finding quotes

I really like finding good quotes.  I think I started ‘collecting’ them, in a sense, while I was in college.  It was the first time in my life where I did a lot of nonfiction reading.  As a naturally fiction-loving reader, this was a bit of a stretch at first; after time, however, I’ve come to love some of my text books as much as my favourite stories.  They remind me of people who I learned with, or of ideas that I can remember wrestling with at a certain point in time.  Most of my favourite nonfiction authors are highly quotable: Eugene-Pete and N.T. Wright among them.

Quotes help to crystallize those moments: focussing our attention on some thought or attitude or comment that moved us or startled us or made us laugh out loud.  Good quotes.

I discovered while reading The Hobbit for my Mythgard class that the Tolkien quote at the top of my blog is actually something Thorin says near the end of the story.  "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world" (Tolkien, The Hobbit).  Since it’s been a while since I’ve actually gotten to the end of the Hobbit (I’ve restarted it twice, I think?  Since first reading it…) I had no idea this was Thorin’s line!  It actually sounded like something Tolkien would say in his day-to-day life (probably was!).

In parting, here’s another great Tolkien excerpt.  This one from The Lord of the Rings:

“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 still grows, perhaps, the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Anyone with a favourite quote out there?  Let’s hear it!