“Mace watched his beautiful sister. She took after their mother. He took after his father. And they got along about as well as that pair did.”

“My gentle sister seems to have mistaken me for Ned Stark.”“I hear he was taller.”“Not after Joff took off his head.”

“Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us..."Did you..." she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms...”

“These were his people--a strange thought. Maybe not his very own people, as in father, mother, brother, sister, but people just like him. He was lost but not so lost after all.”

“And when Aphrodite was told about Cupid`s rapid progress, she asked Zeus whether he would take her other son, Hymen, along too, since Hymen was already twenty-one & was about to be appointed as the God of Marriage, but knew precious little about love & sex, let alone, marriage.And thus Zeus took Hymen along too on his oyster hunt. But the Nymphs did not like Hymen. They shrieked & ran in all directions at his approach. But Hymen turned out to be a worthy oyster hunter. He caught the Nymphs easily enough & after catching them, he fed them with wine which his father, the God of Wine, made. And thus drugged, he harvested their oysters painlessly. And this was how all virgin Nymphs & girls got their oysters named after him, the God of Marriage.”

“They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.”