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

For herself, she wanted sleet and ice, howling winds, thunder to shake the very stones of the Red Keep. She wanted a storm to match her rage.

Even the sky was grey. Grey and grey and greyer. The whole world grey, everywhere you look, everything grey except the eyes of the bride. The eyes of the bride were brown. Big and brown and full of fear.

Little redcape," he snarled, "when next you bare steel on Shagga son of Dolf, I will chop off your manhood and roast it in the fire." "What, no goats?" Tyrion said, taking a bite of his cheese.

Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.

"Come at once," she had written to him. "Help me. Save me. I need you now as I have never needed you before. I love you. I love you. I love you. Come at once"

Robert was the true steel. Stannis is pure iron, black and hard and strong, yes, but brittle, the way iron gets. He'll break before he bends. And Renly, that one, he's copper, bright and shiny, pretty to look at but not worth all that much at the end of the day.