My old grandmother always used to say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever.

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

Anyone can be killed.

Jon shrugged. 'Girls get the arms but not the swords. Bastards get the swords but not the arms. I did not make the rules, little sister.

Drowning was bad enough. But drowning sad and sober, that's too cruel.

A great many of the epic fantasies, from The Lord of the Rings onward, are about war, but to my mind, a lot of it doesn't really deal honestly with the consequences of war, what war does to us, as a society, what war does to us, as individuals, and the struggle for power, in the same way, and what we're fighting for.

Tyrion let the eunuch help him mount. "Lord Varys," he said from the saddle, "sometimes I feel as though you are the best friend I have in King's Landing and sometimes I feel you are my worst enemy." "How odd. I think quite the same of you.