So many vows … they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or another.

Choosing... it has always hurt. And always will. I know.

Shattered legs may heal in time, but some betrayals fester and poison the soul.

You are grown so very great now, yet the higher a man climbs the farther he has to fall.

One of your northmen hit me with a morningstar during the battle on the Green Fork. I escaped him by falling off my horse. (Tyrion)

My dreams are the usual incoherent nonsense. Like most writers, at some point in my career I thought, well, I have these great dreams but I always forget them in the morning so I’ll leave a pad on my bedside table so I can write it down, and then you have some incredible dream and you write it down and the next morning you wake up and you’ve written ‘purple socks’.

And for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.