“The things we love destroy us every time, lad. Remember that.”

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

“We've changed kins since then, some of us twice. No one cares, no one remembers.”

“Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”

“Death is not the worst thing. It is His gift to us, and end to want and pain. On the day that we are born the Many-Faced God sends each of us a dark angel to walk through life beside us. When our sins and our sufferings grow to great to be borne, the angel takes us.”

“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)”

“I would choose freedom over comfort every time.”