"Aegon pushed the Shy Maid away from a broken tower whose windows stared down like blind black eyes.…Stone eyes are blind eyes, thought Tyrion. - Tyrion, ADwD". What do you think about this statement? Does stone eyes meant for Alayne eyes?
No, in this specific instance I don't think so.
The quote concerns the progression of the greyscale in the "stone men", who are lurking around the Bridge of Dream, in exile in the Sorrows.
Their shuffling, semi-dead appearance, their listless swarming around the lamps, their predatory aggression, and the legend of the Shrouded Lord, and indeed their blindness, brings to mind the wights and the White Walkers, or even shrouded Lady Stoneheart and her sinister Brotherhood, Melisandre and her fanatical followers, or on a more metaphorical level the Unsullied who are robbed even of the sensation of pain.
Ultimately, it is a metaphor for anyone who becomes so hardened by trauma, or so enthralled by the power of a leader, that they begin to lose their humanity, that their connection with life withers away. Their compassion dies, their judgment falters. They become blind.
(While the wights are emphasized to "see", it is likely not their own consciousness that does so. They are a husk, a mask.)
Deep inside, for all these stone men, their essence remains. The Unsullied crave the comforts of human connection, the Brotherhood is made up of regular misguided men, some of Mel's followers refer back to the Seven when distressed, and even the wights "remember".
It is a living kind of death.
Jon Connington picks up that image beautifully. Hung up on the past, idolizing a terrible person and unable to even see them clearly, growing progressively alienated from the compassion that stayed his hand at Stoney Sept. He was a stone man in the making even before he contracted the disease.
Shireen, on the other hand, was saved from the progression of the greyscale because her parents invested everything in making her better, and she is a lovely young person in spite of her scars. No matter what Val says, her past does not dictate her future. She is not dead.
Tyrion escapes contracting the disease itself, but he is another kind of stone man already, eaten up by his vengeful anger.
That's my take on it, anyway. :)
I feel like it has a relationship to Doran Martell's struggle with a disease that imprisons him slowly. There is a wonderful post on the subject by @kasamira.
