“No mother loves all her children the same, not even the Mother Above.”

“No mother should outlive her children, and no captain should outlive his ship.”

“The wind cut like a knife up here, and shrilled in the night like a mother mourning her slain children.”

“Mhysa!” a brown-skinned man shouted out at her. He had a child on his shoulder, a little girl, and she screamed the same word in her thin voice. “Mhysa! Mhysa!”Dany looked at Missandei. “What are they shouting?”“It is Ghiscari, the old pure tongue. It means ‘Mother.’”Dany felt a lightness in her chest. I will never bear a living child, she remembered. Her hand trembled as she raised it. Perhaps she smiled. She must have, because the man grinned and shouted again, and others took up the cry. “Mhysa!” they called. “Mhysa! MHYSA!” They were all smiling at her, reaching for her, kneeling before her. “Maela,” some called her, while others cried “Aelalla” or “Qathei” or “Tato,” but whatever the tongue it all meant the same thing. Mother. They are calling me Mother.”

“Mother said," mocked the king. "Don't be childish.""We're children," Myrcella declared haughtily. "We're supposed to be childish."The Hound laughed. "She has you there.”

“For men, the answer was always the same and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.”

“It all goes back and back," Tyrion thought, "to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.”