"What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms? Or the memory of a brother's smile?"
I love how this applies word to word to Ned and Lyanna, but in a way that subverts expectations. Woman's love: yes but platonic not romantic. Newborn son in arms: yes but he is actually a nephew. Brother's smile: no sister's.
I love the way you think. The quote expands far beyond the moment and echoes across past and future, for many characters.
You can paste it straight onto Ned, trace it painfully over Catelyn and Robb, sprinkle it among the Lannister siblings, lace it through Dany's braids, and return it wholesale to Jon and his own choices and longings.
Another thing that I love about this quote is how wrong Aemon is, and how you can turn this quote around on itself. He indicts love as the enemy of duty and honor, as a destroyer of these pure motivations, am inhibitor of effective necessary action.
But, say, what motivation is empty honor, compared to love? What motivation is cold duty compared to love?
I will kill him if I must. The prospect gave Jon no joy; there would be no honor in such a killing, and it would mean his own death as well. Yet he could not let the wildlings breach the Wall, to threaten Winterfell and the north, the barrowlands and the Rills, White Harbor and the Stony Shore, even the Neck. For eight thousand years the men of House Stark had lived and died to protect their people against such ravagers and reavers . . . and bastard-born or no, the same blood ran in his veins. Bran and Rickon are still at Winterfell besides. Maester Luwin, Ser Rodrik, Old Nan, Farlen the kennelmaster, Mikken at his forge and Gage by his ovens . . . everyone I ever knew, everyone I ever loved. If Jon must slay a man he half admired and almost liked to save them from the mercies of Rattleshirt and Harma Dogshead and the earless Magnar of Thenn, that was what he meant to do.
(ASOS, Jon II)
Honor and duty are empty by themselves. And Jon shows us that you do not need them. His most powerful motivation is love, and it leaves him flexible, too, because it allows him to adjust to the necessities of the moment. Look at Ned, all his best decisions are always motivated by love, where blind adherence to honor or duty lead him astray.
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