A GAME OF THRONES - GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

A Game of Thrones - Pg 758

   "It was her fate, Khaleesi," said Aggo.
   If I look back I am lost. "It was a cruel fate," Dany said, "yet not so cruel as Mago's will be. I promise you that, by the old gods and the new, by the lamb god and the horse god and every god that lives. I swear it by the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. Before I am done with them, Mago and Ko Jhaqo will plead for the mercy they showed Eroeh."
   The Dothraki exchanged uncertain glances. "Khaleesi," the handmaid Irri explained, as if to a child, "Jhaqo is a khal now, with twenty thousand riders at his back."
   She lifted her head. "And I am Daenerys Stormborn, Daenerys of House Targaryen, of the blood of Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor the Cruel and old Valyria before them. I am the dragon's daughter, and I swear to you, these men will die screaming."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 748

   The heads were mounted between the crenels, along the top of the wall, impaled on iron spikes so they faced out over the city. Sansa had noted them the moment she'd stepped out onto the wallwalk, but the river and the bustling streets and the setting sun were ever so much prettier. He can make me look at the heads, she told herself, but he can't make me see them.
   "This one is your father," he said. "This one here. Dog, turn it around so she can see him."
   Sandor Clegane took the head by the hair and turned it. The severed head had been dipped in tar to preserve it longer. Sansa looked at it calmly, not seeing it at all. It did not really look like Lord Eddard, she thought; it did not even look real. "How long do I have to look?"
   Joffrey seemed disappointed. "Do you want to see the rest?" There was a long row of them.
   "If it please Your Grace."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 745

   "Did he instruct you to hit me if I refused to come?"
   "Are you refusing to come, my lady?" The look he gave her was without expression. He did not so much as glance at the bruise he had left her.
   He did not hate her, Sansa realized; niether did he love her. He felt nothing for her at all. She was only a... a thing to him.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 699

   A heartbeat, two, four, and suddenly it was as if she and her protectors were alone in the wood. The rest were melted away into the green.
   Yet when she looked across the valley to the far ridge, she saw the Greatjon's riders emerge from the darkness beneath the trees. They were in a long line, and endless line, and as they burst from the wood there was an instant, the smallest part of a heartbeat, when all Catelyn saw was the moonlight on the points of their lances, as if a thousand willowisps were coming down the ridge, wreathed in silver flame.
   Then she blinked, and they were only men, rushing down to kill or die.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 698

   Here was a hush in the night, moonlight and shadows, a thick carpet of dead leaves underfoot, densely wooded ridges sloping gently down to the streambed, the underbrush thinning as the ground fell away.
   Here was her son on his stallion, glancing back at her one last time and lifting his sword in salute.
   Here was the call of Maege Mormont's warhorn, a long low blast that rolled down the valley from the east, to tell them that the last of Jaime's riders had entered the trap.
   And Grey Wind threw back his head and howled.
   The sound seemed to go right through Catelyn Stark, and she found herself shivering. It was a terrible sound, a frightening sound, yet there was music in it too. For a second she felt something like pity for the Lannisters below. So this is what death sounds like, she thought.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 694

   "It will come when it comes," Catelyn told him. When it came, she knew it would mean death. Hal's death perhaps... or hers, or Robb's. No one was safe. No life was certain. Catelyn was content to wait, to listen to the whispers in the woods and the faint music of the brook, to feel the warm wind in her hair.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 674

   "Drink neither wine nor the milk of the poppy," she cautioned him. "Pain you will have, but you must keep your body strong to fight the poison spirits."
   "I am khal," Drogo said. "I spit on pain and drink what I like."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 662

   "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."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 642

   Did you teach him wisdom as well as valor, Ned? she wondered. Did you teach him how to kneel? The graveyards of the Seven Kingdoms were full of brave men who had never learned that lesson.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 630

   The king heard him. "You stiff-necked fool," he muttered, "too proud to listen. Can you eat pride, Stark? Will honor shield your children?" Cracks ran down his face, fissures opening in the flesh, and he reached up and ripped the mask away. It was not Robert at all; it was Littlefinger, grinning, mocking him. When he opened his mouth to speak, his lies turned to pale grey moths and took wing.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 613

   "No sword is strong until it's been tempered," Lord Tywin declared. "The Stark boy is a child. No doubt he likes the sound of warhorns well enough, and the sight of his banners fluttering in the wind, but in the end it comes down to butcher's work. I doubt he has the stomach for it."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 598

   The lords fell silent one by one, and Robb looked up at the sudden quiet and saw her. "Mother?" he said, his voice thick with emotion.
   Catelyn wanted to run to him, to kiss his sweet brow, to wrap him in her arms and hold him so tightly that he would never come to harm... but here in front of his lords, she dared not. He was playing a man's part now, and she would not take that away from him. So she held herself at the far end of the basalt slab they were using for a table... "You've grown a beard."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 572

   Hodor hated cold water, and would fight like a treed wildcat when threatened with soap, but he would happily immerse himself in the hottest pool and sit for hours, giving a loud burp to echo the spring whenever a bubble rose from the murky green depths to break upon the surface.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 524

  "My lord," he said, "King Robert is gone. The Gods give him rest."
   "No," Ned answered. "He hated rest. The gods give him love and laughter, and the joy of righteous battle."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 521

   Perhaps it was all in the knowing. They had ridden past the end of the world; somehow that changed everything. Every shadow seemed darker, every sound more ominous. The trees pressed close and shut out the light of the setting sun. A thin crust of snow cracked beneath the hooves of their horses, with a sound like breaking bones. When the wind set the leaves to rustling, it was like a chilly finger tracing a path up Jon's spine. The Wall was at their backs, and only the gods knew what lay ahead.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 517

   "My lord." The voice made Jon glance back in surprise. Samwell Tarly was on his feet. The fat boy wiped his sweaty palms against his tunic. "Might I... might I go as well? To say my words at this heart tree?"
   "Does House Tarly keep the old gods too?" Mormont asked.
   "No my lord," Sam replied in a thin, nervous voice. The high officers frightened him, Jon knew, the Old Bear most of all. "I was named in the light of the Seven at the sept on Horn Hill, as my father was, and his father, and all the Tarlys for a thousand years."
   "Why would you forsake the gods of your father and your House?" wondered Ser Jaremy Rykker.
   "The Night's Watch is my House now," Sam said. "The Seven have never answered my prayers. Perhaps the old gods will."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 510

   Ned took out the king's last letter. A roll of crisp white parchment sealed with golden wax, a few short words and a smear of blood. How small the difference between victory and defeat, between life and death.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 508

   "Robert is not dead yet. The gods may spare him. If not, I shall convene the council to hear his final words and consider the matter of the succession, but I will not dishonor his last hours on earth by shedding blood in his halls and dragging frightened children from their beds."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 500

   The sound Viserys Targaryen made when that hideous iron helmet covered his face was like nothing human. His feet hammered a frantic beat against the dirt floor, slowed, stopped. Thick globs of molten gold dripped down onto his chest, setting the scarlet silk to smoldering... yet no drop of blood was spilled.
   He was no dragon, Dany thought, curiously calm. Fire cannot kill a dragon.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 499

   The sword point pushed through her silks and pricked at her navel. Viserys was weeping, she saw; weeping and laughing, both at the same time, this man who had once been her brother.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 492

   Bells rang and drums beat a stately cadence as they marched along the godsway. Stolen heroes and the gods of dead peoples brooded in the darkness beyond the road. Alongside the procession, slaves ran lightly through the grass with torches in their hands, and the flickering flames made the great monuments seem almost alive.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 464

   Ned was clad in a white linen doublet with the direwolf of Stark on the breast; his black wool cloak was fastened at the collar by his silver hand of office. Black and white and grey, all the shades of truth.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 460

   "You have nothing to give us but your lives. How would you like to die, Tyrion son of Tywin?"
   "In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden's mouth around my cock, at the age of eighty," he replied.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 431

   Alyssa Arryn had seen her husband, her brothers, and all her children slain, and yet in life she had never shed a tear. So in death, the gods had decreed that she would know no rest until her weeping watered the black earth of the Vale, where the men she had loved were buried. Alyssa had been ded six thousand years now, and still no drop of the torrent had ever reached the valley floor far below. Catelyn wondered how large a waterfall her own tears would make when she dies.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 398

   He could feel Greyjoy's eyes on him. No doubt he was smiling. He smiled a lot, as if the world were a secret joke that only he was clever enough to understand.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 386

   Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed to either sid eof them. The forgotten deities of dead cities brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her silver past their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones, their faces chipped and stained, even their names lost in the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths, draped only in flowers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters stood in the grass beside the road; black iron dragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with their barbed tails poised to strike, and other beasts she could not name. Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, others so misshapen and terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 381

   "Now I see. Lord Arryn learned that His Grace had filled the bellies of some whores and fishwives, and for that he had to be silenced. Small wonder. Allow a man like that to live, and next he's like to blurt out that the sun rises in the east. "

A Game of Thrones - Pg 373

   It was her turn. Yet no sooner had she taken her first step than fear caught Catelyn in its jaws. She could feel the emptiness, the vast black gulfs of air that yawned around her. She stopped, trembling, afraid to move. The wind screamed at her and wrenched at her cloak, trying to pull her over the edge. Catelyn edged her foot backward, the most timid of steps, but he mule was behind her, and she could not retreat. I am going to die here, she thought. She could feel cold sweat trickling down her back.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 372

   Above Snow, the wind was a living thing, howling around them like a wolf in the waste, then falling off to nothing as if to lure them  into complacency. The stars seemed brighter up here, so close that she could almost touch them, and the horned moon was huge in the clear black sky.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 342

   The bone was smooth beneath her hand, cold and hard to the touch. She ran her fingers down a tooth, black and sharp, a dagger made of darkness. It made her shiver.
   "It's dead," she said aloud. "It's just a skull, it can't hurt me." Yet somehow the monster seemed to know she was there. She could feel its empty eyes watching her through the gloom, and there was something in that dim, cavernous room that did not love her.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 333

   Ser Rodrik shouted "Winterfell!" and rode to meet him, with Bronn and Chiggen beside him, screaming some wordless battle cry. Ser Willis Wode followed, swinging a spiked morningstar around his head. "Harrenhal! Harrenhal!" he sang. Tyrion felt a sudden urge to leap up, brandish his axe, and boom out, "Casterly Rock!" but the insanity passed quickly and he crouched down lower.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 303

   "The septons preach about the seven hells. What do they know? Only a man who's been burned knows what hell is truly like."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 301

   He pulled her unresisting to her feet.
   "Come, you're not the only one who needs sleep. I've drunk too much, and I may need to kill by brother tomorrow." He laughed again.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 272

   "Last night we had a drowning, a tavern riot, three knife fights, a rape, two fires, robberies beyond count, and a drunken horse race down the Street of the Sisters. The night before a woman's head was found in the Great Sept, floating n the rainbow pool. No one seems to know how it got there or who it belongs to."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 244

   "Is this some trap, Lannister? What's Bran to you? Why should you want to help him?"
   "Your brother Jon asked it of me. And I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 241

   "Stories wait, my little lord, and when you come back to them, why, there they are," Old Nan said. "Visitors are not so patient, and ofttimes they bring stories of their own."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 241

   "Now these were the days before the Andals came, and long before the women fled across the narrow sea from the cities of the Rhoyne, and the hundred kingdoms of those times were the kingdoms of the First Men, who had taken these lands from the children of the forest. Yet here and there in the fastness of the woods the children still lived in their wooden cities and hollow hills, and the faces in the trees kept watch."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 212

   When he had donned his glove again, Jon Snow turned abruptly and walked to the low, icy northern parapet. Beyond him the Wall fell away sharply;  beyond him there was only the darkness and the wild. Tyrion followed him, and side by side they stood upon the edge of the world.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 184

   Jon felt almost as overwhelmed as he had that day on the kingsroad, when he'd seen it for the first time. The Wall was like that. Sometimes he could almost forget that it was there, the way you forgot about the sky or the earth underfoot, but there were other times when it seemed as if there was nothing else in the world.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 163

   He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the narrow sea, to the Free Cities and the green Dothraki sea and beyond, to Vaes Dothrak under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade Sea, to Asshai by the Shadow, where dragons stirred beneath the sunrise.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 123

   "I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. 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." Tyrion tapped the leather cover of the book. "That's why I read so much, Jon Snow."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 122

   When the Two Kings charged, the Targaryen army shivered and shattered and began to run. For a few moments, the chroniclers wrote, the conquest was at an end... but only for those few moments, before Aegon Targaryen and his sisters joined the battle.
   It was the only time that Vhaghar, Meraxes, and Balerion were all unleashed at once. The singers called it the Field of Fire.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 106

   The silver horse leapt the flames as if she had wings.
   When she pulled up before Magister Illyrio, she said, "Tell Khal Drogo that he has given me the wind." The fat Pentoshi stroked his yellow beard as he repeated her words in Dothraki, and Dany saw her new husband smile for the first time.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 106

   Nervously Dany gathered the reins in her hands and slid her feet into the short stirrups. She was only a fair rider; she had spent far more time traveling by ship and wagon and palanquin than by horseback. Praying that she would not fall off and disgrace herself, she gave the filly the lightest and most timid touch with her knees.
   And for the first time in hours, she forgot to be afraid. Or perhaps it was for the first time ever.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 86

   Something about the howling of a wolf took a man right out of his here and now and left him in a dark forest of the mind, running naked before the pack.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 80

   As angry as he was, his father could not help but laugh. "You're not my son," he told Bran when they fetched him down, "you're a squirrel. So be it. If you must climb, then climb, but try not to let your mother see you."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 79

   When he got out from under it and scrambled up near the sky, Bran could see all of Winterfell in a glance. He liked the way it looked, spread out beneath him, only birds wheeling over his head while all the life of the castle went on below. Bran could perch for hours among the shapeless, rain-worn gargoyles that brooded over the First Keep, watching it all: the men drilling with wood and steel in the yard, the cooks tending their vegetables in the glass garden, restless dogs running back and forth in the kennels, the silence of the godswood, the girls gossiping beside the washing well. It made him feel like he was lord of the castle, in a way even Robb would never know.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 79

   The rooftops of Winterfell were Bran's second home. His mother often said that Bran could climb before he could walk. Bran could not remember when he first learned to walk, but he could not remember when he started to climb either, so he supposed it must be true.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 78

   The heart tree had always frightened him; trees ought not have eyes, Bran thought, or leaves that looked like hands.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 29

   Dany could hear the singing of the red priests as they lit their night fires and the shouts of ragged children playing games beyond the walls of the estate. For a moment she wished she could be out there with them, barefoot and breathless and dressed in tatters, with no past and no future and no feast to attend.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 16

   "A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 8

   A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran like moonlight on water with every step it took.

A Game of Thrones - Pg 4

   "Everyone talks about snows forty foot deep, and how the ice wind comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the cold. It steals up on you quieter than Will, and at first you shiver and your teeth chatter and you stamp your feet and dream of mulled wine and nice hot fires. It burns, it does. Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it. It's easier just to sit down or go to sleep. They say you don't feel any pain toward the end. First you go weak and drowsy, and everything starts to fade, and then it's like sinking into a sea of warm milk. Peaceful, like."

A Game of Thrones - Pg 2

   He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the haunted forest had no more terrors for him. 
   Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise.