""May the hair on your toes never fall out" "
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Come, then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy. "
— George MacDonald

"If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence"
— George MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III)

"People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it."
— George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin)

"'We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.'
'What is that, grandmother?'
'To understand other people.'
'Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see.'"
— George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin)

""Love me, beloved; Hades and Death
Shall vanish away like a frosty breath;
These hands, that now are at home in thine,
Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine;
And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride,
In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide,
If the truest love thy heart can know
Meet the truest love that from mine can flow.
Pray God, beloved, for thee and me,
That our sourls may be wedded eternally.""
— George MacDonald (The Diary of an Old soul)

""God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain, because we are committed to him, not to our own good feelings and rewards. He wants us to cleave to him, as Job did, even when we have every reason to deny him hotly. That, I believe, is the central message of Job. Satan had taunted God with the accusation that humans are not truly free. Was Job being faithful simply because God had allowed him a prosperous life? Job's fiery trials proved the answer beyond doubt. Job clung to God's justice when he was the best example in history of God's apparent injustice. He did not seek the Giver because of his gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver." -Yancey pg 91

"[Job] by standing on his own in the midst of suffering, without the benefit of soothing answers, gained powerful new strength. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel has said, 'Faith like Job's cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.' " - Yancey pg 92 "
— Philip Yancey (Where Is God When It Hurts?)

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to...

- Frodo to Sam"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"All we have is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

""What are we holding on to, Sam?" (Frodo)

"That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for." (Sam)

(From The Lord of the Rings screenplay by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens; incorrectly attributed to JRR Tolkien)"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"'Where did you go to, if I may ask?' said Thorin to Gandalf as they rode along.
'To look ahead,' said he.
'And what brought you back in the nick of time?'
'Looking behind,' said he."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit)

"[Fairy tale] does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat...giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy; Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Myth is mecessary because reality is so much larger than rationality."
— Rolland Hein

"He who lacks imagination lives but half a life. He has his experiences, he has his facts, he has his learning. But do any of these really live unless touched by the magic of the imagination?"
— Paul Fenimore Cooper

"A friend of mine once defined love as finding someone you can talk to late into the night"
— James Patterson

"Books may well be the only true magic."
— Alice Hoffman

"Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning."
— Alice Hoffman

"I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible."
— Alice Hoffman

"That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination."
— Alice Hoffman

"Some people say, 'Save yourself and you save your ways.' I say, 'Be yourself and you save your soul.'"
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

"The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be."
— Alice Hoffman (The Foretelling)

"I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off your relish for spiritual things, whatever increases the authority of the body over the mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may seem in itself."
— Susanna Wesley

"How would you judge the lawfulness or unlawfulness of "pleasure?"
Use this rule:
Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sight of God, takes from you your thirst for spiritual things or increases the authority of your body over your mind, then that thing to you is evil.
By this test you may detect evil no matter how subtly or how plausibly temptation may be presented to you."
— Susanna Wesley

""Some day soon," Lance said, "you'll walk out of here and have to decide how you're going to live the rest of your lives. Will you be defined by what other people see, or by the essence of your soul?""
— Andrew Davidson

""You'll swoop from incredible highs when you're just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you've accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent""
— Andrew Davidson (The Gargoyle)

"It's not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phaontom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may "get the girl" - but usually only with a pickax."
— Andrew Davidson

""Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.""
— Andrew Davidson