I’ve been reading Lord of the Rings again and I just came to this passage I love:
Merry: “if I had known what the world outside was like, I don’t think I should have had the heart to leave it.
Haldir: Not even to see fair Lothlorien? 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 with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. Some there are among us who sing that the Shadow will draw back, and peace shall come again. Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime. For the Elves, I fear, it will prove at best a truce, in which they may pass to the Sea unhindered and leave the Middle-earth for ever. Alas for Lothlorien that I love! It would be a poor life in a land where no mallorn grew. But if there are mallorn-trees beyond the Great Sea, none have reported it.”