Karen

“Were the Romans Christians?” I asked him, remembering my curiosity at the Roman farm. “Not always,” Ravn said. “They had their own gods once, but they gave them up to become Christians and after that they knew nothing but defeat.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom

“My friend, you had horses, and deed of arms, and the free fields; but she, being born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.
-Gandalf to Eomer, of Eowyn”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys

“The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation... Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom