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"I think that if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining."

"There is a parable of the process in Frodo's wondering at Gandalf's fortuitous return: 'What brought you back in the nick of time?' The wizard replies: 'Looking behind.' Just so the narrative."

This dialogue occurs solely in The Hobbit, a book in which Frodo does not appear. In fact, it's an exchange between Thorin and Gandalf. But I suppose all these vertically challenged characters look alike.

"My judgment of Turnus is that he could not look farther than the moment. [...] And at last, when he had to face the implacable, he seemed to act in a kind of panic. But it was not fear, even then. It was recklessness meeting the reckoning."

"I saw my husband almost at once. He stood out among them, not by any ornament or richness of cloting -- they were all dressed like soldiers on the march who'd been on duty a long time and crammed onto ships on the sea as well, all plain and worn and dirty -- he simply stood out, the way the morning star stands out from other stars."

'Another roll like that, and we shall have no masts,' said Pullings, as the remaining crockery, the glasses and the inhabitants of the gun-room all shoot over to the lee. 'We'll lose the mizen first, [...] and so we'll be a brig; then we'll lose the foremast, so we'll be a right little old sloop; then we'll lose the main, and we'll be a raft, which is what we ought to have begun as.'

Elbridge Gerry "opposed, for example, the power to raise a standing army, which he famously compared to an erect penis: 'An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.'"

"Jay shrugged off the controversy [over Jay's Treaty] with his characteristic humor. He joked that he could find his way across the entire country by following the light of his burning effigies."

"His life rests like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand, a thing so light the merest breath of wind can carry it away."