• His face twisted in sudden anguish. "I'm his squire," he repeated, as the rain ran down his face, "but he left me."
  • Everything that is Aemon
    • Talking to Jon of hearing the news that his family had been slaughtered.
    • Aemon Targaryen, Jon thought, a king's son and a king's brother and a king who might have been.
    • He spoke of dreams and never named the dreamer, of a glass candle that could not be lit and eggs that would not hatch. He said the sphinx was the riddle, not the riddler, whatever that meant. He asked Sam to read for him a book by Septon Barth, whose writing had been burned during the reign of Baelor the Blessed. Once he woke up weeping. "The dragon must have three heads," he wailed, "but I am too old and frail to be one of them. I should be with her, showing her the way, but my body has betrayed me."
    • "For all these years I've lingered, waiting, watching, and now that the day has dawned I am too old. I am dying, Sam." Tears ran from his blind white eyes at the admission. "Death should hold no fear for a man as old as me, but it does. Isn't it silly? It is always dark where I am, so why should I fear darkness? Yet I cannot help but wonder what will follow, when the last warmth leaves my body. Will I feast forever in the Father's golden hall as the septons say? Will I talk with Egg again, find Daeron whole and happy, hear my sisters singing to their children? What if the horselords have the truth of it? Will I ride through the night sky forever on a stallion made of flame? Or must I return again to this vale of sorrow? Who can say, truly? Who has been beyond the wall of death to see? Only the wights, and he know what they are like. We know."
    • "It is hard to be so old," he sighed as he settled into the cushion. "And harder still to be so blind. I miss the sun. And books. I miss books most of all."
    • "He was a good man," he began...but as soon as he had said the words he knew that they were wrong. "No. He was a great man. A maester of the Citadel, chained and sworn, and Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch, ever faithful. When he was born they named him for a hero who had died too young, but though he lived a long long time, his own life was no less heroic. No man was wisest, or gentler, or kinder. At the Wall, a dozen lords commander came and went during his years of service, but he was always there to counsel them. He counseled kings as well. He could have been a king himself, but when they offered him the crown he told them they should give it to his younger brother. How many men would do that?" Sam felt the tears welling in his eyes, and knew he could not go on much longer. "He was the blood of the dragon, but now his fire has gone out. He was Aemon Targaryen. And now his watch is ended."
  • Ser Bonifer Hasty abandoning knighthood when Rhaella becomes queen.
  • Septon Merribald's speech.
  • "And the mystery knight should win the tourney, defeating every challenger, and name the wolf maid the queen of love and beauty." "She was," said Meera, "but that' s a sadder story." "Are you certain you never heard this tale before, Bran?" asked Jojen. "Your lord father never told it to you?" Bran shook his head.
  • Beric Dondarrion not being able to remember who he was.
    • "Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?"
  • (TV series) When Cersei says that she was praying after her mother died and her father told her that gods have no mercy because they are gods.
  • "Mhysa!" A browned-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 Ghiscasri, 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.
  • "This is folly, Tyrion," declared Lord Tywin. "Speak to the matter at hand. You are not on trial for being a dwarf." "That is where you err, my lord. I have been on trial for being a dwarf my entire life."
  • Stannis Baratheon's entire life, from Proudwing to the deaths of Lord Steffon and Lady Cassana, the awful marriage to Selyse Florent, and Shireen's grayscale.
    • Stannis, my lord, my sad sullen boy, son I never had, you must not do this, don’t you know how I have cared for you, lived for you, loved you despite all? Yes, loved you, better than Robert even, or Renly, for you were the one unloved, the one who needed me most. And I will serve you to the last, my sweet lord, my poor lonely son, Cressen thought, for suddenly he saw the way.
    • "I stopped believing in gods the day I saw the Windproud break up across the bay. Any gods so monstrous as to drown my mother and father would never have my worship, I vowed. In King's Landing, the High Septon would prattle me of how all justice and goodness flowed from the Seven, but all I ever saw of either was made by men."
  • Anytime the Stark children miss each other.
    • She pictured the two of them sitting together in a garden with puppies in their laps, or listening to a singer strum upon a lute while they floated down the Mander on a pleasure barge. If I give him sons, he may come to love me. She would name them Eddard and Brandon and Rickon, and raise them all to be as valiant as Ser Loras. And to hate Lannisters, too. In Sansa's dreams, her children looked just like the brothers she had lost. Sometimes there was even a girl who looked like Arya.
    • 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. "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 thought of Robb, with snowflakes melting in his hair. Kill the boy and let the man be born. He thought of Bran, clambering up a tower wall, agile as a monkey. Of Rickon's breathless laughter. Of Sansa, brushing out Lady's coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow. He thought of Arya, her hair as tangled as a bird's nest.
  • That fight was over almost as soon as it began. Brandon was a man grown, and he drove Littlefinger all the way across the bailey and down the water stair, raining steel on him with every step, until the boy was staggering and bleeding from a dozen wounds. "Yield!" he called, more than once, but Petyr would only shake his head and fight on, grimly. When the river was lapping a their ankles, Brandon finally ended it, with a brutal backhand cut that bit through Petyr's rings and leather into the soft flesh below the ribs, so deep that Catelyn was certain that the wound was mortal. He looked at her as he fell and murmured "Cat" as the bright blood came flowing out between his mailed fingers. She though she had forgotten that.
  • "What did he say?" the man who had been her brother asked her, flinching. It had grown so silent in the hall that she could hear the bells in Khal Drogo's hair, chiming softly with each step he took. His bloodriders followed him, like three copper shadows. Daenerys had gone cold all over. "He says you shall have a splendid golden crown that men shall tremble to behold." Viserys smiled and lowered his sword. That was the saddest thing, the thing that tore at her afterward... the way he smiled. "That was all I wanted," he said. "What was promised."
  • "What we offer cannot be bought with gold. The cost is all of you. Men take many paths through this vale of tears and pain. Ours is the hardest. Few are made to walk it. It takes uncommon strength of body and spirit, and a heart both hard and strong. I have a hole where my heart should be, she thought, and nowhere else to go.
  • "He served, but found no pride in service. He fought, but took no joy in victory. He drank, to drown his pain in a sea of wine. He did not love, nor was he loved himself. It was hate that drove him. Though he committed many sins, he never sought forgiveness. Where other men dream of love, or wealth, or glory, this man Sandor Clegane dreamed of slaying his own brother, a sin so terrible it makes me shudder just to speak of it. Yet that was the bread that nourished him, the fuel that kept his fires burning. Ignoble as it was, the hope of seeing his brother's blood upon his blade was all this sad and angry creative lived for...and even that was taken from him, when Prince Oberyn of Dorne stabbed Ser Gregor with a poisoned spear."
  • The other whores said that the Sailor's Wife visited the Isle of the Gods on the days when her flower was in bloom, and knew all the gods who lived there, even the ones that Braavos had forgotten. They said she went to pray for her first husband, her true husband, who had been lost at sea when she was a girl no older than Lanna. "She thinks that if she finds the right god, maybe he will send the winds and blow her old love back to her," said one-eye Yna, who had known her longest, "but I pray it never happens. Her love is dead, I could taste that in her blood. If he ever should come back to her, it will be a corpse."
  • When he was still a lonely child in the depths of Casterly Rock, he oft rode dragons through the nights, pretending he was some lost Targaryen princeling, or a Valyrian dragonlord soaring high o'er fields and mountains. Once, when his uncles asked him what gift he wanted for his nameday, he begged them for a dragon. "It wouldn't need to be a big one. It could be little, like I am." His uncle Gerion thought that was the funniest thing he had ever heard, but his uncle Tygett said, "The last dragon died a century ago, lad." That had seemed so monstrously unfair that the boy had cried himself to sleep that night.
  • "That was in the dawn of the days, when our sun was rising. Now it sinks, and this is our long dwindling. The giants are almost gone as well, they who were are bane and our brothers. The great lions of the western hills have been slain, the unicorns are all but gone, the mammoths down to a few hundred. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come as well. In the world that men have made, there is no room for them, or us." She seemed sad when she said it, and that made Bran sad as well. It was only later that he thought, Men would not be sad. Men would be wroth. Men would hate and swear a bloody vengeance. The singers sing sad songs, where men would fight and kill.
  • What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins.
  • The Unsullied paying the whores to hold him.
  • Dany hanging onto Khal Drogo until the last moment.
  • Dacey Mormont's death.
  • "I remember a man throwing me up in the air when I was very little. I was never afraid when he was throwing me. I knew he'd always be there to catch me. Then one day he wasn't."
  • Dany and the dragons chained up.
  • Jorah loving Dany in vain.
  • When Cersei finally break down during her walk. I had really hoped she'd break down until after the smallfolk saw her.
  • Theon/Reek not being able to tell anyone that he didn't actually kill Bran and Rickon.
  • Barristan/Ashara
  • Bran seeing through the weirwoods but never being able to stay.
may 31 2012 ∞
may 31 2012 +