George R. R. Martin Quotes

No one who wears a crown is ever safe.

Tell Robb that I'm going to command the Night's Watch and keep him safe, so he might as well take up needlework with the girls and have Mikken melt down his sword for horseshoes. - Jon Snow

It was the easiest thing in the world for Arya to step up behind him and stab him. “Is there gold hidden in the village?” she shouted as she drove the blade up through his back. “Is there silver? Gems?” She stabbed twice more. “Is there food? Where is Lord Beric?” She was on top of him by then, still stabbing. “Where did he go? How many men were with him? How many knights? How many bowmen? How many, how many, how many, how many, how many, how many? is there gold in the village?

And who are you, the proud Lord said that I must bow so low? Only a cat of a different coat, that's all the truth I know. In a coat of gold or a coat of red, a lion still has claws. And, mine are as long and sharp, my Lord as long and sharp as yours. And so he spoke, and so he spoke, that Lord of Castamere, but now the rains weep o'er his hall, with no one there to hear. Yes, now the rains weep o'er his hall, and not a soul to hear.

The Beauty raised her eyes, the only part of her that was truly beautiful.

I watch NFL football on Sundays. I enjoy gaming with friends, meaning role-playing games; I still enjoy going to conventions and traveling.

Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.

You were made to be kissed, often and well.

I knew a man once who told me that I smiled at the wrong things." "Do you? "Only by the light of those who smile at nothing.

When you know what a man wants you know who he is, and how to move him.

Choosing... it has always hurt. And always will. I know.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

Tyrion Lannister could not have been more astonished if Aegon the Conqueror himself had burst into the room, riding on a dragon and juggling lemon pies.

I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.

She had killed him with a whisper, and she would kill two more before she was through. I’m the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought. And that night, there was one less name to hate.

Ser Cleos looked like a weasel, fought like a goose, and had the courage of an especially brave ewe.

Robert wanted to be loved. My brother Tyrion has the same disease. Do you want to be loved, Sansa?” “Everyone wants to be loved.” “I see flowering hasn’t made you any brighter,” said Cersei. “Sansa, permit me to share a bit of womanly wisdom with you on this very special day. Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same.

Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.

It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it.

Free folk don't follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on a tunic," the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. "They won't dance for coins, they don't care how your style yourself or what that chain of office means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow the man.

The more people you love, the weaker you are.

In my dreams, I kill him every night,' Robert admitted. 'A thousand deaths will still be less than he deserves'.

It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish.

I dreamed... in the black of night a man asks all the questions he dare not ask by daylight. For me, the past years, only one question has remained. Why would the gods take my eyes and my strength, yet condemn me to linger on so long, frozen and forgotten? What use could they have for an old done man like me? ... I remember, Sam. I still remember. Remember what? Dragons, Aemon whispered.

When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.

She just laughed in his face and told him she'd sooner crawl in a bed with his father's leeches before she'd crawl in one with him. She stopped laughing when he put his knife in her.

Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night.

Explain to me why it is more noble to kill ten thousand men in battle than a dozen at dinner.

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

The true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves.

I've been very lucky. There were times when I was afraid I would never sell another book, but I never doubted I'd write another book.

A long summer always meant a long winter to come.

There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

It was that white cloak that soiled me, not the other way around.

I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little.

I am not questioning your honor, I am denying its existence.

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.

All dwarfs are bastards in their father's eyes

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.

One voyage to the East and a man could live as rich as a lord until the end of his days. When he'd been younger, Davos had dreamed of making such voyages himself. But the years went dancing by like moths around a flame, and somehow the time had never been quite right.

The sea is never weary. I must be as tireless.

Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover’s kisses, and melted on her cheeks. At the center of the garden, beside the statue of the weeping woman that lay broken and half-buried on the ground, she turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes. She could feel the snow on her lashes, taste it on her lips. It was the taste of Winterfell. The taste of innocence. The taste of dreams.

She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and Bran and Rickon… but it was Jon Snow she thought of most. She wished somehow they could come to the Wall before Winterfell, so Jon might muss up her hair and call her “little sister.” She’d tell him, “I missed you,” and he’d say it too at the very same moment, the way they always used to say things together. She would have liked that. She would have liked that better than anything.

I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off.

Oh, my sweet summer child," Old Nan said quietly, "what do you know of fear? Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods

Valar Morghulis - All men must die.