Sometimes the best way to baffle them is to make moves that have no purpose, or even seem to work against you

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

For men, the answer was always the same and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.

It’s being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it’s like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It’s not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.

She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it for her.

I am only a little lion, child, and I vow, I shall not savage you.

All the world knew that a maester forged his silver link when he learned the art of healing—but the world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.