Contact
Privacy
Book: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
Quotes of Book: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
TOP TAGS :taofencemomentsdiary-entrysuper-8selfishnessargumentsfade

  1. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    Or rather, it made him into two people. He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a great zest for life. He loved good talk and physical activity. He had a deep sense of humour and a great capacity for making friends. But from now onwards there was to be a second side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and more closely related to his mother's death, when he was in this mood he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever.
    book-quote

  2. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    And though he liked drawing trees he liked most of all to be with trees. He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them. It saddened him to discover the not everyone shared his feelings towards them.
    book-quote

  3. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
    book-quoteinventionmyths

  4. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.No, said Tolkien, they are not....just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.We have come from God {continued Tolkien}, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.
    book-quotechristmythmyths

  5. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    May you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them. G. B. Smith's words were a clear call to Ronald Tolkien to begin the great work that he had been meditating for some time, a grand and astonishing project with few parallels in the history of literature. He was going to create an entire mythology.
    book-quote

  6. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    This love for the memory of the countryside of his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother.
    book-quote

  7. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    Tolkien preserved this postcard carefully, and long afterwards he wrote on the paper cover in which he kept it: 'Origin of Gandalf'.
    book-quote

  8. Humphrey Carpenter _ J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

    But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.No, said Tolkien, they are not....just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.We have come from God {continued Tolkien}, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand."
    book-quotechristmythmyths
Categories