Chaos isn’t 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’ll never know this. Not until it’s too late.

— David Benioff

Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.” I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.

— David Benioff

He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.

— David Benioff

I'm just not a natural teacher.

— David Benioff

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

— David Benioff

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.

— David Benioff

‎I 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.

— David Benioff

Kola 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.

— David Benioff

Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?

— David Benioff

She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He mouths 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

— David Benioff