These doctors... talking about surviving. One year, two years, like it's the only thing that matters. But what good is it, to just survive if I am too sick to work, to enjoy a meal, to make love? For what time I have left, I want to live in my own house. I want to sleep in my own bed. I don't wanna choke down 30 or 40 pills every single day, lose my hair, and lie around, too tired to get up... and so nauseated that I can't even move my head.
— Are you ashamed of me, Father?
— When you were an infant, a Dornish trader landed on Dragonstone. His goods were junk except for one wooden doll. He had even sewn a dress on it in the colors of our house. No doubt he'd heard of your birth and assumed new fathers were easy targets. I still remember how you smiled when I put that doll in your cradle. How you pressed it to your cheek. By the time we burned the doll, it was too late. I was told you would die. Or worse, the greyscale would go slow. Let you grow just enough to know the world before taking it away from you. Everyone advised me to send you to the ruins of Valyria to live out your short life with the stone men, before the sickness spread through the castle. I told them all to go to hell. I called in every maester on this side of the world. Every healer. Every apothecary. They stopped the disease and saved your life. Because you do not belong across the world with the bloody stone men. You are the Princess Shireen of House Baratheon. And you are my daughter.
– Billions on billions will suffer and die.
– I'll suffer, if I have to kill you.
– More than every living thing in the universe?
– Yes.
My throat hurt. I couldn't breathe. I heard someone screaming. I realized, because my throat hurt so much, that I was the one who was screaming.
No matter what I do... no matter how hard I try... the ones I love will always be the ones who pay.
If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents' generation and from your children's generation too. They'll never understand you and they'll be shocked no matter what you do. But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: 'There's a chip off the old block,' and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: 'What an old rip Grandma must have been!' and they'll try to be like you.
It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.