Quotes from Diana Gabaldon

The room was as big as the Duke of Pardloe's library and had at least as many books, and yet the feeling of it was more akin to a small cluttered hole (Pardloe's) You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not, Books that were usedhad an open, interested feel to them, even when closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order. You felt as though the book took on as much interest in you as you did in it and it was willing you to reach for it.

Damn ye, woman! Will ye never do as you're told?" "Probably not," I said meekly.

And was there love there? Beyond the limits of flesh and time, was all love possible? Was it necessary? The voice of my thoughts seemed to be Uncle Lamb's. My family, and all I knew of love as a child. A man who had never spoken love to me, who had never needed to, for I knew he loved me, as surely as I knew I loved. For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary. It is all. It is undying. And it is enough.

My life is yours. And it's yours to decide what we shall do, where we go next. To France, to Italy, even back to Scotland. My heart has been yours since the first time I saw ye, and you've held my soul and body between your hands here and kept them safe. We shall go as ye say.

That's the best thing I can think of. Having a good hold on your arse always makes me feel steady.

Who needed the relief of occasional bad language more than a mother of small children? Maybe

turned me away from him and fitted himself to my back so we lay nested together.

Feel my heart," he said. His voice sounded thick to his own ears. "Tell me if it stops.

a marriage is made not in ritual or in words but in the living of it

I've spent more than twenty years looking for answers, Roger, and I can tell you only one thing: There aren't any answers, only choices. I've made a number of them myself, and no one can tell me whether they were right or wrong.

At the best of times, Father Bain's face resembled a clenched fist.

Snapped abruptly to a realization of how rudely I had been staring, I blushed and said without thinking, I was just wondering if you've ever been kissed by a beautiful young girl? I went still redder as he shouted with laughter. With a broad grin, he said Many times, madonna. But alas, it does not help. As you see. Ribbit.

Well, I say it is the place of science only to observe, he said. To seek cause where it may be found, but to realize that there are many things in the world for which no cause shall be found; not because it does not exist, but because we know too little to find it. It is not the place of science to insist on explanation---but only to observe, in hopes that explanation will manifest itself.

There's a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional.

Aye, beg me for mercy, Sassenach. Ye shallna have it, though; not yet.

I could know ye all my life, I think, and always love you.

Not a hothouse flower, this daughter of Leoch, despite her surroundings.

True, the body's easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled - yet there's that in a man that is never destroyed.

If your head thinks up mischief, your backside's going to pay for it.

Ye must always give money for a new blade," he explained, half smiling. "So it kens ye for its owner, and willna turn on ye.

His mouth tightened up and he says, 'I thought this was the young man who only a week past was shouting that he wasn't afraid to die. Surely a man who's not afraid to die isn't afraid of a few lashes?' and he gives Jamie a poke in the belly wi' the handle of the whip. "Jamie met Randall's eye straight on then, and said, 'No, but I'm afraid I'll freeze stiff before ye're done talking.

He said the truth is the truth, and people should take responsibility for their own actions, which is right.

Shell shock, they said in the First World War. Battle fatigue, in the Second. It's what happens when you live through things you shouldn't have been able to live through and can't reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.

But war has a long fuse, and a slow match.