"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.
When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. — Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
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