Welcome to Top Ten Tuesday! This is a weekly feature hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where a new top ten list hits the web every week!

This week we have a great topic to explore …

FAVORITE BOOK QUOTES

Admission time: I don’t keep track of quotes.  I know, I know, I’m an awful person!

Please understand I always mean to write down my favorite quotes from novels.  I tell myself this is the book where I’m going to start doing that, but I never do.  Not that there aren’t passages I actually want to remember, because there are, but I tend to get so caught up in the story that I don’t want to interrupt my reading to write down a special passage or two.  And since I’m one of the handful of people who still prefer a book in my hands to an e-reader, I suppose this problem is going to continue.  Thankfully, though, there are a few books I know so well my favorite passages are easy to find.

10. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Short cuts make long delays.”

9.  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin 

“A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”

8.  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

7. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

6.  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

 5.  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“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.”

4.  J.R.R. Tolkien, 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.”

3.  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass.”

2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

1.  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit 

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

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