Quotes from A Dance with Dragons

George R.R. Martin ·  1125 pages

Rating: (454K votes)


“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“A man might befriend a wolf, even break a wolf, but no man could truly tame a wolf.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons



“Foes and false friends are all around me, Lord Davos. They infest my city like roaches, and at night I feel them crawling over me.” The fat man’s fingers coiled into a fist, and all his chins trembled. “My son Wendel came to the Twins a guest. He ate Lord Walder’s bread and salt, and hung his sword upon the wall to feast with his friends. And they murdered him. Murdered, I say, and may the Freys choke upon their fables. I drink with Jared, jape with Symond, promise Rhaegar the hand of my own beloved granddaughter…but never think that means I have forgotten. The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer’s farce is almost done. My son is home.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“I am Cersei of House Lannister, a lion of the Rock, the rightful queen of these Seven Kingdoms, trueborn daughter of Tywin Lannister. And hair grows back.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother's milk. Darkness will make you strong.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Not all men were meant to dance with dragons.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Keep walking. If I look back I am lost.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons



“‎[Melisandre] "His Grace is growing fond of you."
[Jon] "I can tell. He only threatened to behead me twice."
Page 58”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Are you a maid, Penny?" She blushed. "Yes. Of course. Who would have –"
"Stay that way. Love is madness, and lust is poison.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“He'll be down with the books. My old septon used to say books are dead men talking. Dead men should keep quiet is what I say. No one wants to hear a dead man's yabber.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Men are men, vows are words, and words are wind.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North, whose name is STARK.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons



“You are the blood of the dragon. You can make a hat.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“I think life is a jape. Yours, mine, everyone's”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honour, for love.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Asha Greyjoy did not intend to be taken alive. She would die as she had lived, with an axe in her hand and a laugh upon her lips.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons



“She wants fire, and Dorne sent her mud.
You could make a poultice out of mud to cool a fever. You could plant seeds in mud and grow a crop to feed your children. Mud would nourish you, where fire would only consume you, but fools and children and young girls would choose fire every time.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“The ruby at Melisandre's throat gleamed red. "It is not those foes who curse you to your face that you must fear, but those who smile when you are looking and sharpen their knives when you turn your back. You would do well to keep your wolf close beside you. Ice, I see, and daggers in the dark. Blood frozen red and hard, and naked steel. It was very cold."
"It is always cold on the Wall."
"You think so?"
"I know so, my lady."
"Then you know nothing, Jon Snow," she whispered.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“And what lesson can we draw from Volantene history?”
“If you want to conquer the world, you best have dragons.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“I know nothing, Ygritte, he [Jon Snow] thought, and perhaps I never will.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Still ... in this world only winter is certain.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons



“Allow me to give my lord one last piece of counsel," the old man had said, "the same counsel I once gave my brother when we parted for the last time. He was three-and-thirty when the Great Council chose him to mount the Iron Throne. A man grown with sons of his own, yet in some ways still a boy. Egg had an innocence to him, a sweetness we all loved. Kill the boy within you, I told him the day I took ship for the Wall. It takes a man to rule. An Aegon, not an Egg. Kill the boy and let the man be born." The old man felt Jon's face. "You are half the age that Egg was, and your own burden is crueler one, I fear. You will have little joy of your command, but I think you have the strength in you to do the things that must be done. Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“So young," said Wyman Manderly, "Though mayhaps this was a blessing. Had he lived he would've grown up to be a Frey.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


“Give me priests who are fat and corrupt and cynical,(...) the sort who like to sit on soft satin cushions, nibble sweetmeats, and diddle little boys. It's the ones who believe in gods who make the trouble. (Tyrion)”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Dance with Dragons


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About the author

George R.R. Martin
Born place: in Bayonne, New Jersey, The United States
Born date September 20, 1948
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Popular quotes

“Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, has argued that the main job of the modern prefrontal cortex is to bias the brain—and therefore, you—toward doing “the harder thing.” When it’s easier to stay on the couch, your prefrontal cortex makes you want to get up and exercise. When it’s easier to say yes to dessert, your prefrontal cortex remembers the reasons for ordering tea instead. And when it’s easier to put that project off until tomorrow, it’s your prefrontal cortex that helps you open the file and make progress anyway.”
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“It’s hard to feel supported when you can’t tell people everything. People haven’t really got a clue what it’s like. It’s hard to trust anyone. It’s hard to believe people won’t let you down. I’m feeling like I want to cry. My body feels hollow. Empty. I don’t feel like I’m 17. I feel young. I’m not sure how old, maybe about 10 yrs. It’s hard to accept that I can’t get all the support I need from one person. From any person. It’s hard that no one can fully understand. It’s hard for me to admit that inside I feel a really lonely person. What do I need to do to take care of myself right now? Well I need to cuddle my teddies — it sounds silly, but I need some comfort...
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“[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.

Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin


“I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz


“Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy to bias people so that they form false memories, “remembering” events in their lives with great clarity, even though they never occurred. This is one reason that eyewitness testimony in courts of law is so problematic: eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. A huge number of psychological experiments show how easy it is to implant false memories into people’s minds so convincingly that people refuse to admit that the memory is of an event that never happened.”
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