One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.
George R. R. MartinRead
I grew up with four T.V. channels. If you missed a show, you missed it. You gotta wait a week for the next one. I'd mail-order books: take a quarter, get an envelope, send off for it and wait until it arrived. I grew up waiting for things.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the value of patience and the anticipation of waiting for things to happen in life.
George R. R. Martin's quote highlights a different experience of growing up in a time when instant gratification was not the norm. He emphasizes how waiting for a show or a book created a sense of anticipation and value in the experience, contrasting it with the immediacy of modern life.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of patience, one might say, 'As George R. R. Martin reminds us, waiting for things can make them more valuable.'
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.
Here is the amazing thing about Easter; the resurrection Sunday for Christians is this, that Christ in the dying moments on the cross gives us the greatest illustration of forgiveness possible.
The property a man has in his own industry, is violated, whenever he is forbidden the free exercise of his faculties or talents, except insomuch as they would interfere with the rights of third parties.
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time.
We are slow to believe that which if believed would hurt our feelings.
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