“If you sit on the doorstep long enough, I daresay you will think of something”

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

“I don’t know,’ said Frodo. ‘It came to me then, as if I was making it up; but I may have heard it long ago. Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?” He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End, especially after he had been out for a long walk.”

“I sit beside the fire and think Of all that I have seenOf meadow flowers and butterfliesIn summers that have beenOf yellow leaves and gossamerIn autumns that there wereWith morning mist and silver sunAnd wind upon my hairI sit beside the fire and thinkOf how the world will beWhen winter comes without a spring That I shall ever seeFor still there are so many thingsThat I have never seenIn every wood in every springThere is a different greenI sit beside the fire and thinkOf people long agoAnd people that will see a worldThat I shall never knowBut all the while I sit and thinkOf times there were beforeI listen for returning feet And voices at the door”

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them. Filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present : like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but I t felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”

“He [Bilbo] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.' . . .”

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”