One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.
George R. R. MartinRead
In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.
Interpretation
It's difficult to clearly define what is good and what is evil in real life.
This quote highlights the complexity of morality in everyday situations, suggesting that distinguishing between good and evil is not always straightforward. It invites reflection on our perceptions of morality and how subjective interpretations can influence our understanding of actions and intentions in the world around us.
In practice
Discussing the complexities of morality in a philosophy class.
One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.
I hate outlines. I have a broad sense of where the story is going; I know the end, I know the end of the principal characters, and I know the major turning points and events from the books, the climaxes for each book, but I don't necessarily know each twist and turn along the way. That's something I discover in the course of writing and that's what makes writing enjoyable. I think if I outlined comprehensively and stuck to the outline the actual writing would be boring.
There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: βNot today.
I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had.β He turned to face the hall, that sea of pale faces. βI wish I had enough poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster you would have me be, yet there it is. I am innocent, but I will get no justice here.
But a voice inside her whispered, There are no heroes, and she remembered what Lord Petyr had said to her, here in this very hall. 'Life is not a song, sweetling,' he'd told her, 'You may learn that one day to your sorrow.' In life, the monsters win, she told herself.
I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
The thing that haunts a man the most is what he isn't ordered to do.
If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved
Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.
Why go from the individual to the entire race, from the singular to the group, from the guilty to the innocent? We know why. That is how racism works. That is racism in action.
People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'
The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.