A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2)

by George R.R. Martin

Her sadness is my shame,

Pylos was a polite youth, no more than five-and-twenty,

A castle must have towers wherever two walls meet at an angle, for defense.

I have climbed these steps so often I know each one by name.”

To them I’ll always be the Onion Knight.”

but he had also decreed that he lose a joint of each finger on his left hand, to pay for all his years of smuggling.

The lord had used a butcher’s cleaver, the better to cut clean and true.

flesh that spoke of leather

Maester Cressen fancied he could hear Lord Stannis grinding his teeth half a castle away.

Am I to accept a broken realm?”

“Great wrongs have been done you, but the past is dust.

the faintest hint of a mustache on her upper lip. She plucked it daily and cursed it regularly, yet it never failed to return.

Her eyes were pale, her mouth stern, her voice a whip. She cracked it now.

Such a small thing to hold the power of life and death.

the world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.

In the Citadel, it was simply called the strangler. Dissolved in wine, it would make the muscles of a man’s throat clench tighter than any fist, shutting off his windpipe.

Sigma

I am too old and wise to fear such things,

She was not beautiful. She was red, and terrible, and red.

“The night is dark and full of terrors.”

When he came close enough, she lunged, right between his legs, so hard that if her wooden sword had had a point it would have come out between his butt cheeks.

The gown had long sleeves to hide the bruises on her arms. Those were Joffrey’s gifts as well.

“What a man sows on his name day, he reaps throughout the year.”

These are gnats, not knights.

“We’re children,” Myrcella declared haughtily. “We’re supposed to be childish.”

One of his eyes was green, one was black, and both were cool.

It wasn’t the gods who’d been cruel, it was Joffrey.

A lady’s armor is courtesy,

“All sorts of people are calling themselves kings these days.”

Oooof

“I am loyal to my beloved Joffrey.” “No doubt. As loyal as a deer surrounded by wolves.”

Oooof

“I am only a little lion, child, and I vow, I shall not savage you.”

Cersei could smell weakness the way a dog smells fear.

I’d sooner hold a wine goblet than a battle-axe.

Compared to the hospitality I enjoyed in the Vale of Arryn, drums, horseshit, and fly bites are my favorite things.”

I ask for an army and my father sends me a dwarf.

“Two? If you mean to frighten me, why not say four?”

He was walking on rotten ice now,

He could read her face like one of his favorite books, and what he read now was rage, and fear, and despair.

“Who you lie with is no matter to me … although it doesn’t seem quite just that you should open your legs for one brother and not the other.”

Bruh

“Be gentle, Cersei, I’m only jesting with you. If truth be told, I’d sooner have a nice whore. I never understood what Jaime saw in you, apart from his own reflection.”

LMAO

“Truly, sister, you were born to be a widow.”

Schemes are like fruit, they require a certain ripening.

“fresh rats.” Doubtless fresh rats were to be preferred to old stale rotten rats.

“Lord Littlefinger always finds a way, my lord.

a soft eunuch’s smile on his powdered face.

“Young lady,” Shae repeated, savoring the words. “You’re half right, m’lord. I’m young.”

“I’m terrified of my enemies, so I kill them all.”

When he said, I was taken by a sudden urge to meet your young lady, what he meant was, You tried to hide her, but I knew where she was, and who she was, and here I am.

“In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?”

He’d never had a pain he liked half so well.

“We have our own names at Winterfell,” Rickon told them haughtily when he heard that.

Lmao