A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)

by George R.R. Martin

the world is one great web, and a man dare not touch a single strand lest all the others tremble.

I knew I should get no joy from coupling with her. Instead I summoned a bedwarmer and fucked her vigorously until the madness passed.

She did not know how, no more than I did. We kept bumping our noses, but when I touched her tongue with mine she trembled.

A homely maid, thought Tyrion, but sometimes the ugliest ones are the hungriest once abed.

Wildlings, the Seven Kingdoms called them; they named themselves the free folk. They looked neither wild nor free—only hungry, frightened, numb.

The women are the strong ones.

Men love to complain about their wives and lords, he told me once. Those without wives complain twice as much about their lords.”

I am the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I.

This girl is as good as dead. I have just fucked a corpse. Even her eyes looked dead. She does not even have the strength to loathe me.

“They do whatever they think will win them votes,” said Mormont. “Food, drink, spectacle … Alios has sent a hundred pretty slave girls out into the streets to lie with voters.”

There is always someone quicker and stronger, Ser Rodrik had once told Jon and Robb. He’s the man you want to face in the yard before you need to face his like upon a battlefield.

“I have no sister. Only brothers. Only you.” Lady Catelyn would have rejoiced to hear those words, he knew.

There is no way I can help her. I put all kin aside when I said my words. If one of my men told me his sister was in peril, I would tell him that was no concern of his.

sorcery was a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it.”

worst part is not the dying, it’s not knowing when or how.

false humility of youth that is itself a sort of pride.

And no doubt that is just what he intends. Every fool loves to hear that he’s important.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,” said Jojen. “The man who never reads lives only one.

“Stay that way. Love is madness, and lust is poison. Keep your maidenhead. You’ll be happier for it,

So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever last.

“My father had a saying too. Never wound a foe when you can kill him. Dead men don’t claim vengeance.”

Azor Ahai shall be born again amidst smoke and salt to wake dragons out of stone. Dragonstone is the place of smoke and salt.”

All singers were half-mad. In songs, the hero always saved the maiden from the monster’s castle, but life was not a song,

I fucked Jaime on the morning of my wedding, the queen recalled.

thing about bondage was how easy it was to grow accustomed to it. The life of most slaves was not all that different from the life of a serving man at Casterly Rock, it seemed to him.

If there are gods to listen, they are monstrous gods who torment us for their sport. Who else would make a world like this, so full of bondage, blood, and pain?

She saw sailors on the prowl for whores, and whores on the prowl for sailors.