Middle Earth First Age Quotes

Galadriel his sister went not with him to Nargothrond, for in Doriath dwelt Celeborn, kinsman of Thingol, and there was great love between them. Therefore she remained in the Hidden Kingdom, and abode with Melian, and of her learned great lore and wisdom concerning Middle-earth. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

A tremendous thunderclap was heard, the loudest there has ever been ... The sun remained hidden behind dark clouds, and there was only twilight, gray and misty. Then the earth trembled, and there came a great roar of something immense moving. The people saw a sheer green wall advancing toward them, filling the valley from one side to the other. At first they did not know what it was, and then they realized that it was a wall of green water. Destroying everything in its path, it came like a huge beast, a green monster, rushing upon them, foaming, hissing, in a cloud of spray. It engulfed the seer's house and carried it away with the seer, who was never seen again. Then the water fell upon the villages, sweeping away homes, people, fields and trees. The flood swept the valley clean as with a broom. Then it rushed on beyond the valley to wreak havoc elsewhere. ~ Richard Erdoes

If you want to know the age of the Earth - look upon the sea in a storm. But what storm can fully reveal the heart of a man? Between Suez and the China Sea are many nameless men who prefer to live and die unknown. This is the story of one such man. Among the great gallery of rogues and heroes thrown up on the beaches and ports - no man was more respected or more damned than - Lord Jim. ~ Joseph Conrad

The Silmarils are Eorclanstánas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns, 'holy'. With middangeard line 37 cf. my father's note in Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, in A Tolkien Compass, p. 189: 'The sense is 'the inhabited lands of (Elves and) Men', envisaged as lying between the Western Sea and that of the Far East (only known in the West by rumour). Middle-Earth is a modern alteration of medieval middel-erde from Old English middan-geard'. ~ Christopher Tolkien

I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…

The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.

The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: 'Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on. ~ Edward Thomas

The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not
change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she
was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same
time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest
times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or
breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived. It
wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black
Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the
time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was
working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that
faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the
avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong.
But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power
structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and
superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially
virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too
smart to be sexists.
That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more than that
-- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own for
ab ~ Neal Stephenson

Wars and chaoses and paradoxes ago, two mathematicians between them ended an age d began another for our hosts, our ghosts called Man. One was Einstein, who with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man's perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives.
...
The other was Goedel, a contemporary of Eintstein, who was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined: In any closed mathematical system--you may read 'the real world with its immutable laws of logic'--there are an infinite number of true theorems--you may read 'perceivable, measurable phenomena'--which, though contained in the original system, can not be deduced from it--read 'proven with ordinary or extraordinary logic.' Which is to say, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio. There are an infinite number of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein defined the extent of the rational. Goedel stuck a pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that it held still long enough for people to know it was there.
...
The visible effects of Einstein's theory leaped up on a convex curve, its production huge in the first century after its discovery, then leveling off. The production of Goedel's law crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, th ~ Samuel R. Delany

...Women have preserved this `baby look' for as long as possible so as to make the world continue to believe in the darling, sweet little girl she once was, and she relies on the protective instinct in man to make him take care of her.
As with everything a woman undertakes on her own initiative, this whole maneuvre is as incredible as it is stupid. It is amazing, in fact, that it succeeds. It would appear very shortsighted to encourage such an ideal of beauty. For how can any woman hope to maintain it beyond the age of twenty-five? Despite every trick of the cosmetics industry, despite magazine advice against thinking or laughing (both tend to create wrinkles), her actual age will inevitably show'- through in the end. And what on earth is a man to do with a grown-up face when he has been manipulated into considering only helpless, appealing little girls to be creatures of beauty?

What is a men to do with a woman when the smooth curves have become flabby tires of flesh, the skin slack and pallid, when the childish tones have grown shrill and the laughter sounds like neighing? What is to become of this shrew when her face no longer atones for her ceaseless inanities and when the cries of `Ooh' and Ah' begin to drive him out of his mind? This mummified `child' will never fire a man's erotic fantasy again. One might think her power broken at last.

But no, she still manages to get her own way - and for two reasons. The first is obvious: she now has child ~ Esther Vilar

The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.

Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philosophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.

(The Earth in Space and Time §1) ~ H.G. Wells

O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children. [...] There is no old doctrine handed down among you by ancient tradition nor any science which is hoary with age, and I will tell you the reason behind this. There have been and will be again many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes, the greatest having been brought about by earth-fire and inundation. Whatever happened either in your country or ours or in any other country of which we are informed, any action which is noble and great or in any other way remarkable which has taken place, all that has been inscribed long ago in our temple records, whereas you and other nations did not keep imperishable records. And then, after a period of time, the usual inundation visits like a pestilence and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education. And thus you have to begin over again as children and know nothing of what happened in ancient times either among us or among yourselves.'
'As for those genealogies of yours which you have related to us, they are no better than tales of children; for in the first place, you remember one deluge only, whereas there were a number of them. And in the next place there dwelt in your land, which you do not know, the fairest and noblest race of men that ever lived of which you are but a seed or remnant. And this was not known to you because for many generations the survivors of that destruction made no records.'
[Spoken by a priest of Egypt] ~ Plato

SYNCHRONICITY

'The earth is alive, and it feels with you. It follows your footsteps, your search, with equal anxiety, because it will be transfigured in your triumph. The end of Kaliyuga and the entry into a new Golden Age depend on the results of your war. The earth by itself cannot finish the work that Nature leaves incomplete. Today the earth has joined forces with man in his destructive passion. The great catastrophe will occur in the first years of the Age of Aquarius. But if you can find the entrance to the Invisible Double of this earth, fulfilling the mystery of 'loveless A-Mor', the volcanoes will become calm, the earthquake will cease and the catastrophe will be avoided.

'There is an essential 'synchronicity' between the soul and the landscape. What you achieve in yourself will have repercussions in even the remotest corner of the universe, like the ringing of a bell which announces a triumph or a defeat, producing irreversible effects in a secret centre where Destiny acts. The Archetype is indivisible and, if you once confront it in an essential manner, the effects are universal and valid for all eternity. The old Chinese saying expresses it well: 'If a man, sitting in his room, thinks the right thoughts, he will be heard thousands of leagues away.' And the alchemical saying, too: 'It doesn't matter how alone you are. If you do true work, unknown friends will come to your aid.'

'What I have called "synchronicity', Nietzsche called ' ~ Miguel Serrano

I love to walk through snow, to climb mountains, to smell the fresh air and I love to dream about flying. Soaring through the air, watching the earth from above, feeling the wind in my face and touching the clouds would be an amazing experience. ~ Oliver Neubert

I learned by heart the lines of your face. I can draw them blindly on a water canvas.
Your face in the middle of an inflamed argument. Your face in the middle of a mild one-- when you're at fault.
Your face filled with rainbows of laughter. Your face filled with clouds of distress.
Your face, fluttering, when I open you the door. Your face, agonizing, every time I stand waiting, for the elevator.
Your face, eager, when you kiss me. Your face, surprised, when I lead you to bed.
Your face in the middle of pain. Your face on the outskirts of pleasure.
Your face, with a baffled look, when you wake up. Your face falling asleep, with total surrender.
Your face the first night we met. Your face the last night we parted.
I learned by heart the lines of your face. They all led me into hell.
They all led me into heaven. ~ Malak El Halabi

The whole atmosphere of the book, the tone of 'The Hobbit,' is of a kid's adventure story, told in the first person by Tolkien, who is introducing young people to the notion of Middle-earth. A lot of it is very light-hearted. ~ Ian McKellen

Another point important to recognize is that the creation was 'mature' from its birth. It did not have to grow or develop from simple beginnings. God formed it full-grown in every respect, including even Adam and Eve as mature individuals when they were first formed. The whole universe had an 'appearance of age' right from the start. It could not have been otherwise for true creation to have taken place. 'Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them' (Genesis 2:1). ~ Henry M. Morris

Callie scrambled from under the covers, dashed around the bed, and flung herself into Luce's arms. "They kept telling me you were going to be okay, but in that lying, we're-also-completely-terrified-we're-just-not-going-to-explain-a-word-to-you kind of way. Do you even realize how thoroughly spooky that was? It was like you physically dropped off the face of the Earth-"
Luce hugged her back tightly. As far as Callie knew, Luce had been gone only since the night before.
"Okay, you two," Molly growled, pulling Luce away from Callie, "you can OMG your faces off later. I didn't lie in your bed in that cheap polyester wig all night enacting Luce-with-stomach-flue so you guys could blow our cover now." She rolled her eyes. "Amateurs."
"Hold on. You did what?" Luce asked.
"After you...disappeared," Callie said breathlessly, "we knew we could never explain it to your parents. I mean, I could barely fathom it after seeing it with my own eyes. When Gabbe fixed up the backyard, I told your parents you felt sick and had gone to bed, and Molly pretended to be you and-"
"Lucky I found this in your closet." Molly twirled a short wavy black wig around one finger. "Halloween remnant?"
"Wonder Woman." Luce winced, regretting her middle school Halloween costume, and not for the first time.
"Well, it worked."
It was strange to see Molly-who'd once sided with Lucifer-helping her. But even Molly, like Cam and Roland, didn't want to fall again. So here they w ~ Lauren Kate

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together a ~ Bill Bryson

The age of the earth was thus increased from a mere score of millions [of years] to a thousand millions and more, and the geologist who had before been bankrupt in time now found himself suddenly transformed into a capitalist with more millions in the bank than he knew how to dispose of ... More cautious people, like myself, too cautious, perhaps, are anxious first of all to make sure that the new [radioactive] clock is not as much too fast as Lord Kelvin's was too slow. ~ William Johnson Sollas

Despite a thousand Easter hymns and a million Easter sermons, the resurrection narratives in the gospels never, ever say anything like, "Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death," let alone, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die." Nor even, in a more authentic first-century Christian way, do they say, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised from the dead after the sleep of death." No. Insofar as the event is interpreted, Easter has a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world's true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God's new creation has begun - and we, his followers, have a job to do! Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven! To be sure, as early as Paul the resurrection of Jesus is firmly linked to the final resurrection of all God's people. ~ N. T. Wright

He twisted the heavy gold ring around his finger. It had been in his family for generations, passed down to each eldest child along with the family mission of once again ushering in the Golden Age of Man.
His great-great-grandfather had been the first of their Order to make physical progress toward the ultimate goal: to free the powerful prisoners from the center of the Earth. ~ Lisa Kessler

The undersigned pointed out that nothing was required of a pastor except that he intimate in church at the dead man's bier his date of birth and date of death and thereafter say some little prayer or other, even if it were only the Lord's Prayer; and finally sprinkle the State's three spadefuls of earth with the statutory innocent phrases, Earth to earth, etc., as is the custom.

Pastor Jón Prímus: That's not so innocent as it looks. It derives from those scholastics. They were always doing their utmost to falsify Aristotle, though he was quite bad enough already. They tried to feed the fables with yet more fables, such as that the primary elements of matter first disintegrate and then reassemble to resurrect. They lied so fast in the Middle Ages they hadn't even time to hiccup. ~ Halldor Laxness

I've lived near here at several different stretches across time, but once, when I lived here a few hundred years ago, I had a camel I named Oded. He was just about the laziest creature ever to talk the Earth. He would pass out when I was in the middle of feeding him, and making it to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle. But when I first met you in that lifetime-"
"Oded broke into a run," Luce said without thinking. "I screamed because I thought he was going to trample me. You said you'd never seen him move like that."
"Yeah, well," Daniel said. "He liked you."
They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce's jaw dropped. "I did it!" she cried out. "It was just there, in my memory, a part of me. Like it happened yesterday. I came to me without thinking!"
It was miraculous. All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each time Lucinda died in Daniel's arms were somehow finding their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel.
No. She was finding her way to them.
It was like a gate had been left open after Luce's quest through the Announcers. Those memories stayed with her, from Moscow to Helston to Egypt. Now more were becoming available.
She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was-and she wasn't just Luce Price from Thunderbolt, Georgia. She was every girl she'd ever been, an amalgamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love.
She wa ~ Lauren Kate

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. ~ Carl Sagan

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates
the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes
have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria ... After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. ~ Janine Benyus

The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper.
The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age there was nothing. Nor sand, nor the sea, nor cold waves; there was no earth, no sky on high. The gulf galped and grass grew nowhere. ~ A.S. Byatt

#The Vanity of all Worldly Things.

As he said vanity, so vain say I,
Oh! Vanity, O vain all under sky;
Where is the man can say, "Lo, I have found
On brittle earth a consolation sound"?
What isn't in honor to be set on high?
No, they like beasts and sons of men shall die,
And whilst they live, how oft doth turn their fate;
He's now a captive that was king of late.
What isn't in wealth great treasures to obtain?
No, that's but labor, anxious care, and pain.
He heaps up riches, and he heaps up sorrow,
It's his today, but who's his heir tomorrow?
What then? Content in pleasures canst thou find?
More vain than all, that's but to grasp the wind.
The sensual senses for a time they pleasure,
Meanwhile the conscience rage, who shall appease?
What isn't in beauty? No that's but a snare,
They're foul enough today, that once were fair.
What is't in flow'ring youth, or manly age?
The first is prone to vice, the last to rage.
Where is it then, in wisdom, learning, arts?
Sure if on earth, it must be in those parts;
Yet these the wisest man of men did find
But vanity, vexation of the mind.
And he that know the most doth still bemoan
He knows not all that here is to be known.
What is it then? To do as stoics tell,
Nor laugh, nor weep, let things go ill or well?
Such stoics are but stocks, such teaching vain,
While man is man, he shall hav ~ Anne Bradstreet

I heard from clear across the city, over the Hudson in the Jersey yards, one fierce whistle of a locomotive which took me to a train late at night hurling through the middle of the West, its iron shriek blighting the darkness. One hundred years before, some first trains had torn through the prairie and their warning had congealed the nerve. "Beware," said the sound. "Freeze in your route. Behind this machine comes a century of maniacs and a heat which looks to consume the earth." What a rustling those first animals must have known. ~ Norman Mailer

In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, "This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman." Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being. ~ George Orwell

Spread your arms out to your sides, like a plane. Your wingspan is a timeline. Your left fingertip represents the time of the first single-celled life on earth. And your right fingertip is right this minute. Between the two is 3.7 billion years of time, the history of life on earth.

From your left fingertip, all the way up your arm, past your left shoulder, across your chest, and past your right shoulder, life on earth is nothing but bacteria. By the time you reach your right wrist, the most impressive form of life on earth, the king of beasts, is the worm. In the middle of your right palm you finally get your dinosaurs, and they're extinct by your last finger joint.

Run your eyes along that history again so far. All that history, all that life, and still no appearance by the Main Attraction, the species for whom everything is supposedly made - humankind.

So when do humans finally show up at the party? Well it's more than fashionably late. Homo sapiens fits in one fingernail clipping. ~ Dale McGowan

Certain portions of the earth, escaping utter destruction, become the seedbeds for replenishing the human race, and so it happens that on a world that is not young there are young populations having no culture, whose traditions were swept away in a debacle; they wander over the earth and gradually put aside the roughness of a nomadic existence and by natural inclunation submit to communities and associations; their mode of living is at first simple, knowking no guile and strange to cunning, called in its early stage the Golden Age. [16] The more these populations progress in civilization and employment of the arts, the more easily does the spirit of rivalry creep in, at first commendable but imperceptibly changing to envy; this, then, is responsible for all the tribulations that the race suffers in subsequent ages. So much for the vicissitudes that civilizations experience, of perishing and arising again, as the world goes on unchanged.
[Chapter X - 15,16] ~ Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius

The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain's way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear. ~ Joseph Campbell