Quotes from Gil Adamson

Here was a man who wore his scars on the outside and held a merry heart within. How much better that was than its opposite.

The dwarf and the woman, lucky miscreants, outlanders, errors that should not exist but lived on anyway. (314)

Sometimes Discontent is unknown to the sufferer, a shadowed thing that creeps up from behind. It had been that way for Mary. Of course she knew there were reasons for her unhappiness, there are always reasons. One thinks, I am unhappy, I am discontent, because of this or that. But such thoughts are like a painting of sorrow, not sorrow itself. Then one day it comes, hushed and ferocious, and reasons don't matter anymore." - The Outlander by Gil Adamson

But like all wonders, natural or otherwise, it made your own life seem temporary, and it told you things about the passage of time you didn't want to know.

For who has not wondered whether everything in this world might be alive? Though it be made of stone or wood or metal, there might be life in it, or opinion or, worst of all, resentment. The hewn boards of any boardwalk, did they recall the bite of the saw? Does memory linger in them? Perhaps the forge's fire still dreams in each nail. A building might be made entirely of injured and brooding things.

How cruel that she had really seen him, touched him. That he had been real, not another phantasm drifting greyly among the trees, a little gasp of loneliness from her afflicted mind. But a beautiful face, and a voice not merely familiar but in her bones. The Ridgerunner was gone, and she could still smell him on her hands.

But everything is remembered by its moment of greatest intensity. Dying

His breath was the only sound, and in that darkness it seemed too loud. Was he the only one breathing? He stood and listened hard. For days he had felt as if something was pacing along just behind him, some shy creature following his scent.

But everything is remembered by its moment of greatest intensity. Dying was hers.

face and come to wait at the place where

believed that education was damaging—too much blood to a woman's brain would cause reproductive malfunction. To prove her

SOMETIMES DISCONTENT is unknown to the sufferer, a shadowed thing that creeps up from behind. It had been that way for Mary. Of course, she knew there were reasons for her unhappiness, there are always reasons. One thinks, I am unhappy, I am discontent, because of this or that. But such thoughts are like a painting of sorrow, not sorrow itself. Then one day it comes, hushed and ferocious, and reasons don't matter any more.

The widow's own grandmother had believed that education was damaging — too much blood to a woman's brain would cause reproductive malfunction.