A hound will die for you, but never lie to you. And he'll look you straight in the face.

You make us look bad', complained Toad. 'You looked bad before I ever met you', Jon told him.

The stone is strong. Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I'm not dead either.

The man who fears losing has already lost.

She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it for her.

Men of honor will do things for their children that they would never consider doing for themselves.

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.