David Benioff

She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.

There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.

The front door is usually unlocked and there is no alarm system. They don't wear their seat belts in the car; they don't wear suntan lotion in the sun. They have decided nothing can kill them but God himself, and they don't even believe in him.

Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny.

Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn__ register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you__e too daft to know you__e mortal?

That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.

__ was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.

We always talk about how the first several seasons were faithful to the books, and anybody who wanted to could go onto Wikipedia and learn Ned Stark gets beheaded or about The Red Wedding, and most people don't want to know - because why ruin a story?

I'm just not a natural teacher.

Don__ worry, my friend. I won__ let you die._ I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.

Chaos isn__ a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or love, or the gods_illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. But they__l never know this. Not until it__ too late.

Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,_ began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. __ants to see how they__e getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. __ell me, comrade,_ he asks one farmer. __ow did the potatoes do this year?_ __ery well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God._ __ut God does not exist, Comrade Farmer._ __or do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.

So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying.- from the story "De Composition

It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.

She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss

He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn__ share them all at once.