George R. R. Martin Quotes

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

I do not like to see anything destroyed; any void produced in society; any ruin on the face of the land.

[T]he cold warms me—after a different fashion from that of the kitchen stove.

Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!

Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

In neglected fields the fern grows, which must be cleared out by fire.

What man calls civilization always results in deserts.

I'm falling into disrepair

There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.

Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with.

Creation exists only in regard to destruction. Creation is against destruction.

Fire, even if put on head, burns only.

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.

The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

One man puts the fire out, the other lights the fuse.

Nothing burns like the cold.

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

The fire was silent, the little houses collapsing into the flames without complaint, flocks of sparks rising to the sky. At a distance it seemed beautiful, and I thought it was strange that powerful violence is often so pleasing to the eye.

This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.

Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing each other out. We set this house on fire, forgetting that we live within. (from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)

This is how the fire starts. This is how we burn.

When you sit on something trying to preserve it, you die and become sterile.