Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!

Here you find us sitting on a field of victory, amid the plunder of armies, and you wonder how we came by a few well-earned comforts!

Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to.

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.

If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus and if you're normally troubled by heat and sand... then, to have just at the age when imagination is opening out, suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village, I think it engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midlands English countryside. Based on good water, stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers and so on, and of course, rustic people about.

I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.

Help means ruin and saving means slaying.