George RR Martin

At sea, heavy steel was as like to cost a man his life as to save it.

The southern sky was aswirl with glowing, shifting colors, the reflection of the great fires that burned below. Baleful green tides moved against the bellies of the clouds, and pools of orange light spread across the heavens. The reds and yellows of common flame warred against the emeralds and jades of wildfire, each color flaring and then fading, birthing armies of short-lived shadows to die again an instant later. Green dawns gave way to orange dusks in half a heartbeat. The air itself smelt burnt, the way a soup kettle sometimes smelled if it were left on the fire too long and all the soup boiled away. Embers drifted through the night air like swarms of fireflies.

My most trusted advisors are a eunuch and a sellsword, and my lady's a whore. What does that say about me?

Mercy, thought Theon as Luwin dropped back. There's a bloody trap. Too much and they call you weak, too little and you're monstrous ... His father thought only in terms of conquest, but what good was it to take a kingdom if you could not hold it? Force and fear could only carry you so far.

When it comes to swords, a queen is only a woman after all.

Two hundred men were not an army, but you didn't need thousands to hold a castle as strong as Winterfell. So long as they knew which end of a spear did the killing, they might make all the difference.

One skull looks much like another ...

After the madness of battle, soldiers often seem to want flesh more than coin.

Children are a battle of a different sort ... A battle without banners or warhorns, but no less fierce ... As hard as birth can be, what comes after is even harder.

The battle fever. He had never thought to experience it himself, though Jaime had told him of it often enough. How time seemed to blur and slow and even stop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even your body. "You don't feel your wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat running down into your eyes. You stop feeling, you stop thinking, you stop being you, there is only the fight, the foe, this man and then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you're not, you're alive, and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them laughing." Battle fever. I am half a man and drunk with slaughter, let them kill me if they can!

A dog doesn't need courage to chase off rats ... What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it's all taking favors from ladies and looking fine in gold plate? Knights are for killing.

Bronn had a score of sellswords scattered throughout the crowd with orders to stop any trouble before it started. Perhaps Cersei had similarly disposed her Kettleblacks. Somehow Tyrion did not think it would help much. If the fire was too hot, you could hardly keep the pudding from scorching by tossing a handful of raisins in the pot.