Quotes from A Game of Thrones

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

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

“When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“The things we love destroy us every time, lad. Remember that.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“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, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side?”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“And I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“If I look back I am lost.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

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

“My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer and I have my mind...and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge. That's why I read so much Jon Snow.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Oh, my sweet summer child," Old Nan said quietly, "what do you know of fear?
Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet
deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long
night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children
are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and
hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Life is not a song, sweetling.
Someday you may learn that, to your sorrow.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Give me honorable enemies rather than ambitious ones, and I'll sleep more easily by night.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“You are your mother's trueborn son of Lannister."

"Am I?" the dwarf replied, sardonic. "Do tell my lord father. My mother died birthing me, and he's never been sure."

"I don't even know who my mother was," Jon said.

"Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are." He favored Jon with a rueful grin. "Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs."

And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune.

When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“The things I do for love.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

“A bruise is a lesson... and each lesson makes us better.”
― George R.R. Martin, quote from A Game of Thrones

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“I think the fear gets into your blood. It makes your subatomic particles twist and distort. You change, chemically. The fear changes, too. It because not your helper, but your master. You are a slave to it.”
― Nancy Werlin, quote from The Rules of Survival

“In the backseat Moose and Squirrel inhabited a pair of six-year-old-twins, and wouldn't stop bickering and picking their noses. They were clearly in their element.”
― Neal Shusterman, quote from Everwild

“I love you: You imagine hearing the words from someone not related to you, someone not your best friend, but when someone you love, someone you dream about, actually says them, it makes your body melt and your breath get caught in your chest.”
― Sarah Mlynowski, quote from Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn't Have)

“Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

I explored it all.

Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.

Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.

All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.”
― quote from Blindsight

“Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though”
― Candice Millard, quote from The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.