Bad and worse and worst makes a beggar's choice.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps I cannot make my people good, she told herself, but I should at least try to make them a little less bad.

Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths.

Small men oft feel a need to prove their courage with unseemly boasts, " he declared. "I doubt if he could kill a duck."Tyrion shrugged. "Fetch the duck.

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.

Gold has its uses, but war is won with iron.

Dreams can lie, your Grace.

One man gathers what another man spills

Matthew Arnold was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance said: "Poor Matt, he's going to Heaven, no doubt – but he won't like God.

A character on screen that's the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy,' they're never interesting. There's got to be an internal struggle, the duality is important to find.

I have suggested that scientific progress requires a favorable environment.

Patience may be a virtue, but quitting is an art.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

I do not think it is "selling America short" when we ask a great deal of her; on the contrary, it is those who ask nothing, those who see no fault, who are really selling America short!

I never had any desire to get a tattoo. If I was ever going to get one, I would get a plain anchor with a rope around it, the most unimaginative possible tattoo, like Popeye had.

T-shirts and long pants make me easier to find in a crowd, but also easy to disappear in a crowd because if I am wearing this and suddenly I am not, it's like a Harry Potter invisibility cloak.

Christ is the explanation of all things, the key to life itself.