Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.

All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it... though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces. (a servant in the House of Black and White)

Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman? (wonders Lady Catelyn Stark)

When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.

From where I sit, battles are hard. I’ve written my share. Sometimes I employ the private’s viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That’s vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general’s point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction.

The singers make much of kings who die valiantly in battle, but your life is worth more than a song.

In the end words are just wind.