Her name is Brienne, Jaime said. Brienne, the maid of Tarth. You are still maiden, I hope?Her broad homely face turned red. Yes.Oh, good, Jaime said. I only rescue maidens.
Nothing’ isn’t better or worse than anything. Nothing is just… nothing. Arya Stark
Tyrion let the eunuch help him mount. Lord Varys, he said from the saddle, sometimes I feel as though you are the best friend I have in King’s Landing and sometimes I feel you are my worst enemy. How odd. I think quite the same of you.
If you need help bark like a dog. – Gendry. That’s stupid. If I need help I’ll shout help. – Arya
We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we take ourselves too seriously.
I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?How else? Though not till I’m done reading.
This is a night for song and sin and drink, for come the morrow, the virtuous and the vile burn together.
Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.
A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose. (Maester Aemon)
An honorable death is well and good, but if the life at stake is not your own, what then?
I crossed a thousand leagues to come to you, and lost the best part of me along the way. Don’t tell me to leave.
The things we love destroy us every time, lad. Remember that.
Why won’t they let me be? I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.
…How would you like to die, Tyrion son of Tywin?In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden’s mouth around my cock, at the age of eighty, he replied.
Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.
This was how an enemy should be dealt with: with a dagger, not a declaration.
She had no time for sleep, with the weight of the world upon her shoulders. And she feared to dream. Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night.
‘Dreamsongs’ allows me to show the scope of my writing – with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.
Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.
Fiction is lies; we’re writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.