George R.R. Martin

“Madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new Targaryen is born, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.”

“Two hearts that beat as one.”

“Ride with them, eat with them, fight with them, for as long as it takes.”

“A man can own a woman or a man can own a knife, but no man can own both. Every little girl learns that from her mother.”

“Yes, all Lannisters are lions, and when a Tyrell breaks wind it smells just like a rose.”

“Black or red, a dragon is still a dragon." - Illyrio Mopatis”

“Why, that is why the gods made whores for imps like me.”

“Salt a slug and shame a hero.”

“—Mujer, rebuznas como un asno y hablas con su misma inteligencia.—¿Mujer? —Dejó escapar una risita—. ¿Acaso tratáis de insultarme?”

“Your brother was a terrible traitor, I know, but if we start killing men at weddings they’ll be even more frightened of marriage than they are presently.”

“Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.”

“All Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.”

“En malas manos, una moneda es tan peligrosa como una espada.”

“My tongue lied my eyes shouted the truth.”

“The Targaryens wed brothers and sisters for three hundred years to keep the blood line pure.”

“We only make peace with our enemies. That's why it's called making peace.”

“Nothing but this: I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had... I wish I had enough poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster you would have me be, yet there it is.”

“I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. I grew up in the projects. I never went anywhere. But I have lived a thousand lives and I’ve loved a thousand loves. I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.”

“Lem glowered. "Your lion friends ride into some village, take all the food and every coin they find, and call it foraging. the wolves as well, so why not us? no one robbed you, dog. You just been good and foraged.”

“As she watched him, this tall young man with the new beard and the direwolf prowling at his heels, all she could see was the babe they had laid at her breast at Riverrun, so long ago.”

“The gods are blind. And men see only what they wish.”

“Se la vita non valeva nulla, quanto poteva valere la morte?”

“Las verdades más dolorosas son a las que más hay que aferrarse.”

“The women are the strong ones, truly.”

“Si le cortas la lengua a un hombre, no demuestras que estuviera mintiendo: demuestras que no quieres que el mundo oiga lo que pueda decir.”

“Una vez el Septon Supremo me dijo que el sufrimiento es el precio que pagamos por nuestros pecados. Si eso es cierto, decidme, Lord Eddard... ¿por qué son siempre los inocentes los que más sufren cuando vosotros, los grandes señores, jugáis al juego de tronos?”

“No,” said Bran. “I haven’t. And if I have it doesn’t matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she’d told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time.”

“Las cosas que amamos siempre acaban por destruirnos.”

“El miedo hiere más que las espadas.”

“Abrir los ojos es lo único necesario. El corazón miente y la mente engaña, pero los ojos ven. Mira con los ojos. Escucha con los oídos. Saborea con la boca. Huele con la nariz. Siente con la piel. Y sólo luego piensa, y así sabrás la verdad.”

“My queen,” said Tristifer, “here we have the walls, but if we reach the sea and find that the wolves have taken our ships or driven them away ...”“... we die,” she finished cheerfully, “but at least we’ll die with our feet wet. Ironborn fight better with salt spray in their nostrils and the sound of the waves at their backs.”

“He pushed himself to his feet. “Don’t lie, Sansa. I am malformed, scarred, and small, but…” she could see him groping “…abed, when the candles are blown out, I am made no worse than other men. In the dark, I am the Knight of Flowers.” He took a draught of wine. “I am generous. Loyal to those who are loyal to me. I’ve proven I’m no craven. And I am cleverer than most, surely wits count for something. I can even be kind. Kindness is not a habit with us Lannisters, I fear, but I know I have some somewhere. I could be… I could be good to you.”

“My lady,” Tyrion said. “You are lovely, make no mistake, but … I cannot do this. My father be damned. We will wait. The turn of a moon, a year, a season, however long it takes. Until you have come to know me better, and perhaps to trust me a little.” His smile might have been meant to be reassuring, but without a nose it only made him look more grotesque and sinister.”

“one naked girl with a mud up to her knees could not seem to take her eyes off Tyrion. She has never seen a dwarf before, he realized, much less a dwarf without a nose. He made a face and stuck his tongue out and the girl began to cry”

“The shadows come to dance my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord. The shadows come to stay my lord, stay my lord, stay my lord...”

“Fool's blood, king's blood, blood on the maiden's thigh, but chains for the guests and chains for the bridegroom, aye aye aye.”

“This was a pain that did not touch the body, a pain that did not race along the nerve paths, a pain that filled the mind so completely and so shatteringly that not even the smallest part of you was free to think or plan or meditate. The pain was you, and you were the pain. There was nothing to dissociate from, no cool sanctum of thought where you might retreat. (from The Glass Flower)”

“What can you say about pain?Words can trace only the shadow of the thing itself. The reality of hard, sharp physical pain is like nothing else, and it is beyond language. The world is too much with us, day and night, but when we hurt, when we really hurt, the world melts and fades and becomes a ghost, a dim memory, a silly unimportant thing. Whatever ideals, dreams, loves, fears, and thoughts we might have had become ultimately unimportant. We are alone with our pain, it is the only force in the cosmos, the only thing of substance, the only thing that matters, and if the pain is bad enough and lasts long enough, if it is the sort of agony that goes on and on, then all the things that are our humanity melt before it and the proud sophisticated computer that is the human brain becomes capable of but a single thought: Make it stop, make it STOP! (from The Glass Flower)”

“Why must we draw these lines, these fine distinctions, these labels and barriers that set us apart? Ace and nat and joker, capitalist and communist, Catholic and Protestant, Arab and Jew, Indian and Latino, and on and on everywhere, and of course true humanity is to be found only on our side of the line and we feel free to oppress and rape and kill the "other," whoever he might be. (From the Journal of Xavier Desmond)”

“Friend or foe, the crows care not.”

“She stood on the end of the dock, pale and goosefleshed and shivering in the fog. In her hand, Needle seemed to whisper to her. Stick them with the pointy end, it said, and, don’t tell Sansa! Mikken’s mark was on the blade. It’s just a sword. If she needed a sword, there were a hundred under the temple. Needle was too small to be a proper sword, it was hardly more than a toy. She’d been a stupid little girl when Jon had it made for her. “It’s just a sword,” she said, aloud this time . . . . . . but it wasn’t.Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile. He used to mess my hair and call me “little sister,” she remembered, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes.”

“Everything Syrio Forel had ever taught her vanished in a heartbeat. In that instant of sudden terror, the only lesson Arya could remember was the one Jon Snow had given her, the very first.She stuck him with the pointy end, driving the blade upward with a wild, hysterical strength.”

“He won the war on the battlefield and lost it in a bedchamber, poor fool.”

“I do solemnly proclaim Tyrion of House Lannister and Sansa of House Stark to be man and wife, one flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever, and cursed be the one who comes between them.”

“I often said that writers are of two types.There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener.”

“We're fortunate my brother Stannis is not with us. Remember that time he proposed to outlaw brothels?”

“«Si el hielo puede arder, el amor y el odio se pueden emparejar. Montaña o pantano, da igual. La tierra es una» —Jojen.”

“But prominent families, often forget a simple truth, I've found. Knowledge is power.”

“If war were arithmetic, then the mathematicians would rule the world. (Lord Petyr Baelish)”

“I accept what I am, but I did not choose it. I experience human life in the only way I can, vicariously. I am a voracious consumer of books, tapes, holoplays, fictions and drama and histories of all sorts. I have experimented with dreamdust.”