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“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom.”

-Faramir

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”

Sums up how I feel about this book so far.

Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still, there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”

Even in the light of morning he felt the dark shadow of the tidings that Gandalf had brought.

“My names Bond. James Bond. And I’m the world’s authority on giving up smoking. I do it constantly.”

I find I do not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world.

We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;—and yet too much for twenty years.

Behind all present happiness, there lurks some fear about the future.

“In general, people only ask for advice […] that they may not follow it; or, if they should follow it, that they may have somebody to blame for having given it.”

Nothing passes the time, or shortens the path, like a thought which engrosses all the faculties of an individual’s organization. Our external existence is as a sleep, of which this thought is the dream; and, whilst we are subjected to its influence, time has no longer any measure, nor is there any distance in space: we leave one place, and arrive at another, and are conscious of nothing between.

“A rascal does not laugh in the same manner as an honest man; a hypocrite does not weep with the same kind of tears as a sincere man. All imposture is a mask; and, however well the mask may be made, it may always, with a little attention, be distinguished from the true face.”

“It is a sad thing, in these unhappy times in which we live, that the purest life, the most indisputable virtue, cannot secure a man from disgrace and persecution.”

“You ought not to distrust those who love you!”
“You come quickly to love, sir.”
“It is because love has come quickly on me, and for the first time.”

“When either way may lead to evil, of what worth is choice?”

“A king is only as good as the poorest man under his rule.”

“Kingdoms need kings, and without them they are nothing but empty land inviting a conqueror’s spears.”

“I know I have gained Christ and through His blessing I have gained the whole world too, but for what I have lost, for what we have all lost, there is no end to the reckoning. We lost everything.”

“People talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same? There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one earthly, the other divine.”

“Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.”

“It only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don’t know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.”

“The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him.”

“A man who hasn’t had much experience, and doesn’t think, is apt to measure a nation’s prosperity by the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the nation is prosperous; if low, it isn’t. Which is an error. It isn’t what sum you get, it’s how much you can buy with it, that’s the important thing; and it’s that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name.”

“No people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that.”

“Their entire being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in this life. Their very imagination was dead.”

“Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.”

“You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing.”

“To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.”

“I was afraid of a United Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.

This book is killing me. There are great ideas but the writing is painfully slow and dull. When your prose is this lackluster you need to have fast-paced stories like Isaac Asimov. I want to finish this book because there are interesting aspects, but I wish reading it was more fun and exciting. Not much happens. 300 pages and I could sum up everything important that’s happened in a single paragraph.