"Goodness knows, I've tried and tried, but it's no use. I've given what I had to give. I gave it all to Lord Darlington."
I like this line of dialogue because it uses such simple language to convey an intense emotion. In that way it mimics real-life speech, minus all the things like false starts and plus some literary neatness. The repetition of some words also conveys such a sense of the character's despair/ realisation.
Spoiler! :
For additional context: this line is spoken as part of a larger chunk of dialogue, where the speaker, a butler named Stevens, is talking quite a bit more than a nameless passerby who just came to ask if he was okay, because he's an old man sitting crying on a bench.
Maybe what most people wanted wasn't immortality and fame, but the reassurance that their existence had meant something. No matter how long... or how brief. Maybe being eternal meant becoming a story worth telling. — Roshani Chokshi, Aru Shah and the Nectar of Immortality
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