Perhaps that is the secret. It is not what we do, so much as why we do it.

What's dead may never die.

Much as I admire Tolkien, I once again always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, "Fly, you fools." What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.

Too stupid to learn and too stupid to give up.

Will you make a song for him?' the woman asked. 'He has a song,' the man replied. 'He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire.

That man said he’d take your head too.” “Well, as to that,” Yoren said, “if he can get it off my shoulders, he’s welcome to it.

We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.