There's a Hole in my Bucket Quotes

“love and be loved is worth the risk of potential loss.”
― Royd Tolkien, There's a Hole in my Bucket: A Journey of Two Brothers

“From my experience, it is plain that the governing bodies of the medical profession are driven more by money than anything else. The money is in the pharmaceuticals. In treatment. Not in cure.”
― Royd Tolkien, There's a Hole in my Bucket: A Journey of Two Brothers

“Kindness is painful. That’s why we are sometimes happy to keep other people at arms’ length, why we might shun the comfort of strangers, why we don’t reach out and try to make a difference to other people often enough. It’s just too painful.”
― Royd Tolkien, There's a Hole in my Bucket: A Journey of Two Brothers

“Unable to say all that he wanted to say, Mike saw what many of us fail to see; complacently marching through life and happily keeping other people at arms’ length, it’s so easy to not appreciate the comfort of strangers, to not reach out and make a difference to other people, to not revel in our mutual humanity.”
― Royd Tolkien, There's a Hole in my Bucket: A Journey of Two Brothers

“I peel the flax into strands and weave them into a short length of cord, which I then use to lash together a framework for the butterflied trout, a technique I learned on a course Mike and I went on before one of our Norway trips. I gather some wood and get a fire going, and I cook the fish. As banal as all that sounds, I am loving every minute of this. So I am going to repeat myself. Every second is infused with this heart-swelling awareness of my surroundings. Not only am I in this place of exceptional beauty, of tranquillity, of unsullied nature at its best, I am also cooking (over a fire I started from scratch) a fish that I caught in this river less than an hour ago, a fish that I then gutted, cleaned, butterflied and tethered to a tool of foraged wood that I bound together with cord I made from leaves that were, until not long ago, happily growing beside this river. I needed to reiterate that. It’s the most natural thing in the world, man as hunter-gatherer, living off the land. But it’s nearly all stuff that most of us have forgotten about, stuff that has been regrettably replaced with technology and noise and materialism.”
― Royd Tolkien, There's a Hole in my Bucket: A Journey of Two Brothers

“fatherhood is the one thing in my life that I have taken to like a natural. As someone who’s prone to getting bored quickly and not sticking to things, any fears I had about my ability to be a father evaporated the moment I first held Story in my arms. Fatherhood was the one thing I gladly had no choice about committing to, and for the first time in my life everything made perfect sense. It seemed obvious. The great gulfs in my knowledge, the lack of experience in looking after another human being: they didn’t matter. You just do it. It’s instinctual. It’s funny how these key life events change your perspective.”
― Royd Tolkien, There's a Hole in my Bucket: A Journey of Two Brothers