Our family loves to read and today is Mike’s birthday, so when I discovered that today is Tolkien Reading Day, I just had to post some good quotes from J. R. R. Tolkien for you to enjoy.

“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 the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”

~ from The Fellowship of the Ring

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

~ from The Fellowship of the Ring

March 25th was chosen to commemorate the fall of Sauron in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Because we are huge fans of C.S. Lewis, I was pleased to also find some quotes from Tolkien about his friend.

“Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual–a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher–and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord.”

“The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.”

“So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age–like an old tree that it losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.” ~ on the death of C.S. Lewis

This image is used by permission from Wikimedia Commons.