I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.

To think I should have lived to be goodmorninged by Belladonna Took's son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!

Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?

What do you fear, lady?' he asked. 'A cage,' she said.

There was some murmuring, but also some grins on the faces of the men looking on: the sight of their Captain sitting on the ground and eye to eye with a young hobbit, legs well apart, bristling with wrath, was one beyond their experience.

It is no bad thing celebrating a simple life.