George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

"Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both."

"Men come and go. They lie, or die, or leave you. A mountain is not a man, though, and a stone is a mountain's daughter. I trust myself, and I trust my mules. I won't fall."

"Words are like arrows, Arianne. Once loosed, you cannot call them back."

"Words are wind."

"There is no shame in loving."

"No mortal man could frighten him, no more than the darkness could, nor the bones of his soul, the grey and grisly bones of his soul."

"Innocence and experience make for a perfect marriage."

"History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again."

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I'm done reading."

"Still, beauty can mask deadly danger."

"Dreams turn to dust in light of day."

"... Prophecy is like a treacherous woman. She takes your member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and think, how sweet, how fine, how good this is... and then her teeth snap shut and your moans turn to screams... Prophecy will bite your prick off everytime,"

"War seems like a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. Then they get a taste of battle. For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe. They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now, They take the wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron half helm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the small folk whose land they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad in all steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world. And the man breaks."

"My old grandmother always used to say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever."

"Before he had lost his sight, the maester had loved books as much as Samwell Tarly did. He understood the way that you could sometimes fall right into them, as if each page was a hole into another world."

"The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons."

"I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood."Do you want to die old and craven in your bed"How else? Though not till I'm done reading."

"This was how an enemy should be dealt with: with a dagger, not a declaration."

"Fat men take a cushion with them wherever they go."

"Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old."