Rory

“Quick Ben, tell me, who was the toughest Bridgeburner you ever knew? Think back, and think carefully. Get your ego out of the way. Ignore your favorites and the ones who spent all their time looking mean. Not the callous shits, not the back-stabbers, none of the posers. The toughest, Quick Ben. Day in, day out, good times, bad. Tell me. Who?"
The High Mage squinted, glanced down at the ground at this feet, and then he sighed and nodded, looking up as he said, "I didn't need that list, Ganoes. I knew my answer right from the start. We all knew."
"Who?"
"Fiddler. There's no tougher man alive.”
― Steven Erikson

“I know about sureness,' said Didactylos. 'I remember, before I was blind, I went to Omnia once. And in your Citadel I saw a crowd stoning a man to death in a pit. Ever seen that?'
'It has to be done,' Brutha mumbled. 'So the soul can be shriven and-'
'Don't know about the soul. Never been that kind of philosopher,' said Didactylos. 'All I know is, it was a horrible sight.'
'The state of the body is not-'
'Oh, I'm not talking about the poor bugger in the pit,' said the philosopher. 'I'm talking about the people throwing the stones. They were sure all right. They were sure it wasn't them in the pit. You could see it in their faces. So glad it wan't them in the pit that they were throwing just as hard as they could.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush
Fell on her life. We saw the angry flush
And torsion of paralysis assail
Her noble cheek. We moved her to Pinedale,
Famed for its sanitarium. There she'd sit
In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit
Upon her dress and then upon her wrist.
Her mind kept fading in the growing mist.
She still could speak. She paused, and groped, and found
What seemed at first a serviceable sound,
But from adjacent cells impostors took
The place of words she needed, and her look
Spelt imploration as she fought in vain
To reason with the monsters in her brain.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West