Ross

“Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?" He smiles. "Perhaps one day even I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor ... ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury.”
― R. Scott Bakker

“There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“He gave them what they demanded of him, he obeyed the command, but not sullenly or diffidently, and not in shame. Rooted in the land of his fathers, standing before the home of his family he looked towards the sun and let a name burst forth from his soul.

'Tigana!' he cried that all should hear. All of them, everyone in the square. And again, louder yet: 'Tigana!' And then a third, a last time, at the very summit of his voice, with pride, with love, with a lasting, unredeemed defiance of the heart.

'TIGANA!'

Through the square that cry rang, along the streets, up to the windows where people watched, over the roofs of houses running westward to the sea or eastward to the temples, and far beyond all of these-- a sound, a name, a hurled sorrow in the brightness of the air.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana