The Friday 56: The Passing of the Grey Company

This is a weekly booking meme courtesy of Freda’s Voice. And there is a linkup! The rules are simple: Grab a book, any book. Turn to page 56. Find a sentence, any sentence, and post it. (Or post a few — just don’t spoil it!) Add the post url (not your homepage) to the linky and do some visits.

Since I’m into the 17th installment of a Tolkien series for Part Time Monster and am re-running the series from the beginning on Thursdays at Sourcerer, I’m featuring Tolkien quotes. From The Return of the King.

And while Theoden went by slow paths in the hills, the Grey Company passed swiftly over the plain, and on the next day in the afternoon they came to Edoras; and there they halted only briefly, ere they passed up the valley, and so came to Dunharrow as darkness fell.

The Lady Eowyn greeting them and was glad of their coming . . .

The #Friday56: The Silmarillion

I posted one of these last week, but did not have time to join the linkup on account of the #1000Speak madness. This is a weekly booking meme courtesy of Freda’s Voice. And there is a linkup! The rules are simple: Grab a book, any book. Turn to page 56. Find a sentence, any sentence, and post it. (Or post a few — just don’t spoil it!) Add the post url (not your homepage) to the linky and do some visits.

Since I’m into the 15th installment of a Tolkien series for Part Time Monster and am re-running the series from the beginning on Thursdays at Sourcerer, I’m going back to the Tolkien and sticking with it until I run out of books to quote. From The Silmarillion.

And Melian was his Queen, wiser than any child of Middle-Earth; and their hidden halls were in Menegroth, the Thousand Caves, in Doriath. Great power Melian lent Thingol, who was himself great among the Eldar; for he alone of all the Sindar had seen with his own eyes the Trees in the days of their flowering, and king though he was of Umanyar, he was not accounted among the Moriquendi, but with the Elves of Light, mighty upon Middle-Earth. And of the love of Thingol and Melian there came into the world the fairest of the Children of Iluvatar that was or shall ever be.

The #Friday56: #1000Speak Edition

I started doing these last week. This is a weekly booking meme courtesy of Freda’s Voice. And there is a linkup! The rules are simple: Grab a book, any book. Turn to page 56. Find a sentence, any sentence, and post it. (Or post a few — just don’t spoil it!) Add the post url (not your homepage) to the linky and do some visits.

I have nonfiction this week. From The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, (2003) by Johnathan Schell. A book that opened my eyes to many important nonfictional things.

“At the height of the crisis, Khruschev wrote in his memoirs, he privately asked his generals if they could assure him “that holding fast would not result in the death of 500 million human beings. He went on to report, “They looked at me as though I was out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians would accuse us of appeasement or weakness.” He was led to wonder, “What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that, though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruin, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?”

More about #1000Speak.