Alisa > Alisa's Quotes

“You have hair like the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“His eyes were open wounds beneath his heavy brows, a blue as dark as the sea by night.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Love is the bane of honor, the death of duty. What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms ... or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“A brigand, a barber, a beggar, two orphans, and a boy whore. With such do we defend the realms of men.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Nobody likes cravens,” he said uncomfortably. “I wish we hadn’t helped him. What if they think we’re craven too?”
"You're too stupid to be craven,” Pyp told him.
“I am not,” Grenn said.
“Yes you are. If a bear attacked you in the woods, you’d be too stupid to run away.”
“I would not,” Grenn insisted. “I’d run away faster than you.” He stopped suddenly, scowling when he saw Pyp’s grin and realized what he’d just said.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“How can you still count yourself a knight, when you have forsaken every vow you ever swore?"

Jaime reached for the flagon to refill his cup. "So many vows...they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Because they are the knights of summer, and winter is coming.'' ''Lady Catelyn, you are wrong.'' Brienne regarded her with eyes as blue as her armor. ''Winter will never come for the likes of us. Should we die in battle, they will surely sing of us, and it's always summer in the songs. In the songs all knights are gallant, all maids are beautiful, and the sun is always shining.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Drifting snowflakes brushed her face as light as lover’s kisses, and melted on her cheeks. At the center of the garden, beside the statue of the weeping woman that lay broken and half-buried on the ground, she turned her face up to the sky and closed her eyes. She could feel the snow on her lashes, taste it on her lips. It was the taste of Winterfell. The taste of innocence. The taste of dreams.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“True knights protect the weak.”

He snorted. “There are no true knights, no more than there are gods. If you can’t protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, don’t ever believe any different.”

Sansa backed away from him. “You’re awful.”

“I’m honest. It’s the world that’s awful.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Foolish woman, will holding it secret in your heart make it any less true? If you never tell, never speak of it, will it become only a dream, less than a dream, a nightmare half-remembered? Oh, if only the gods would be so good.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.”
― George R.R. Martin

“If you need help bark like a dog." - Gendry.

"That's stupid. If I need help I'll shout help." - Arya”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Those are brave men... lets go kill them”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Every flight begins with a fall.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“All words are written in the same ink,
'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same,
and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood'
all over the page, the paper would not be stained
now would I bleed.”
― Philippe Jaccottet

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.”
― Lemony Snicket, When Did You See Her Last?

“I want it to be the poet's Camelot: green grass and high towers and ladies in gowns and warriors strewing their paths with flowers. I want minstrels and laughter! Wasn't it ever like that?"
"A little," I said, "though I don't remember many flowery paths. I do recall the warriors limping out of battle, and some of them crawling and weeping with their guts trailing behind them in the dust.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.”
― Mary Oliver

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“In one such call to arms, at an 1897 Audubon lecture held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the ornithologist Frank Chapman spoke of the Birds of Paradise piled up in milliners’ workshops: “This beautiful bird is now almost extinct. The species fashion selects is doomed. It lies in the power of women to remedy a great evil.”
― Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief

“In 1973 the London Convention was replaced by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES, which has 181 signatories. Comprised of three appendices that gauge the severity of threat to various species, CITES protects 35,000 species of plants and animals. Among them are nearly fifteen hundred birds, including Alfred Russel Wallace’s beloved King Bird of Paradise.”
― Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief

“Kelson smirked at the “uninitiated,” the “novice,” and those “so low down in the scale of ignorance” that they couldn’t tell a Jock Scott fly from a Durham Ranger. Of course, neither could a salmon, but in order to justify paying for such costly feathers, some needed to believe that the fish could distinguish between the twenty shades of green described in the masterworks on fly-tying.”
― Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief