The things I do for love

Jaime Lannister's phrase "The things I do for love" is the defining utterance of his character, spoken at the moment he throws Bran Stark from a tower window to conceal the incestuous relationship with his twin sister Cersei. The line encapsulates the central moral paradox of the series: that acts of profound cruelty and betrayal can be rationalized as acts of devotion, and it recurs as a haunting motif that links Jaime's defining crime to the broader web of violence and deception that drives the narrative.

Origin and Context

The phrase is first uttered in the immediate aftermath of Bran Stark's discovery. Having climbed the broken tower of Winterfell, the seven-year-old Bran witnesses Jaime and Cersei Lannister engaged in incestuous intercourse. When the queen spots him, Jaime pulls Bran back up to the window ledge, asks his age, and then, with the words "The things I do for love," shoves the boy backward into empty air. Bran survives the fall but is left crippled, his legs shattered and his back broken. The line thus marks the precise moment when the central secret of the Lannister twins—that Cersei's three children are Jaime's, not King Robert's—becomes a crime that sets the entire Stark-Lannister conflict in motion.

Recurrence as a Motif

The phrase echoes through the narrative as a marker of traumatic memory and moral reckoning. In his fevered coma-dream, Bran hears the words again: a face "shining with light, golden" swims up at him from the grey mist and says, "The things I do for love." Bran screams, and the three-eyed crow that guides him through the dream commands him to forget it: "Not that, put it aside, put it away." The line thus becomes a psychic wound that Bran must suppress in order to survive and learn to fly. Later, when Arya Stark kills the stable boy who tries to capture her after her father's arrest, she drives Needle through his body and hears him make "a soft noise, something between a gasp and a sigh." The moment is a brutal echo of the violence that began with Jaime's shove, and the phrase "the things I do for love" hangs over the entire sequence of betrayals and murders that follow. Sansa Stark, imprisoned in Maegor's Holdfast after her father's execution, dreams of footsteps on the tower stair and wakes murmuring "please, please, I'll be good," a direct parallel to Bran's helplessness before the fall.

Thematic Significance

The phrase operates as a compressed thesis for the entire moral universe of the book. It asserts that love—familial, romantic, possessive—can be used to justify any atrocity, from attempted child murder to regicide to the slaughter of innocents. Jaime's act is framed not as malice but as a twisted form of protection: he is preserving his sister, his children, and his own life. The line recurs at moments when characters commit violence they believe is necessary for those they love, creating a pattern that implicates not only Jaime but the entire system of feudal loyalty and dynastic ambition. The phrase also functions as a piece of dramatic irony: the reader knows that the "love" Jaime invokes is an incestuous bond that has already produced three illegitimate heirs to the throne, and that his act of "love" has set in motion a war that will consume the realm. In this sense, the line is both a confession and a curse, binding Jaime's personal tragedy to the larger catastrophe of the Seven Kingdoms.