Taylor

“Had I done it sooner, perhaps he might have lived. He was a man of courage and good heart, a proud man. Now he is dead. I saved the signal to use in a worthy cause, and when I found one it was wasted.”

“Wasted?” answered Fflewddur. “I think not. Since you did your best and didn’t begrudge using it, I shouldn’t call it wasted at all.”
― Lloyd Alexander, Taran Wanderer

“It's been so happy for us all to have you here, and I've tried not to think of - of the accounting that you and I, too, must give to the Duchesse. I cannot help feeling that you - that we shall pay dearly because you came with us and left her behind."

"I always pay." He spoke evenly, but his brows drew together in a frown. "Sometimes I pay most for what I never had. I've been happy these few days, and at least that's something on my side of the ledger.”
― Rachel Field, All This, and Heaven Too

“The liquid sound of the flute began. As the girl's thin fingers moved over the seven holes of the instrument, her knuckles look like tiny gnomes absorbed in a slow dance. It was a low sound, like the gurgling of a brook. Takuan felt that he himself had turned into flowing water, splashing through a ravine, playing in the shallows. When the high notes sounded, he felt his spirit wafted into the sky to gambol with the clouds. The sound of the earth and the reverberations of heaven mingled and were transformed into the wistful sighs of the breeze blowing through the pines, lamenting the impermanence of this world.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

“If Elirena was a hero, if what she did is heroism, then that's just too bad. Let them call me a traitor and a coward. Because I, Yarpen Zigrin, coward, traitor and renegade, state that we should not kill each other. I state that we ought to live. Live in such a way that we don't, later, have to ask anyone for forgiveness. The Heroic Elirena... She had to ask. Forgive me, she begged, forgive me. To hell with that! It's better to die than to live in the knowledge that you've done something that needs forgiveness.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Blood of Elves