"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.
"Do not try to be pretty. You weren't meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Don't let anyone ever simplify you to just 'pretty'" — Suzanne Rivard
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