One of the most upvoted posts on Reddit today is a link to Samwise Gamgee’s speech to Frodo from The Two Towers. In it, Frodo is despairing. He’s over this “destroy the ring” shit. Sam, looking out from the ruined city of Osgiliath into a Jacksonian green-gray sky, says, in part:
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. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Sam says those storybook characters kept going because they were holding onto something, and when Frodo asks him what that was, Sam drops the hammer: