Quotes from Diana Gabaldon

within the circle of the fire, where part

Ye dinna want to believe in witches and zombies and things that go bump in the night?" she said, with a small, sly smile at me. She nodded at the centipede, struggling round and round in frenzied, lopsided circles. "Well, legends are many-legged beasties, aye? But they generally have at least one foot on the truth." She

And I—so proud of self-sufficiency at one time—could not bear the thought of loneliness again.

Stand up straight and try not to get fat.

Shock was giving way to a nervous impulse to laugh. Ken his family? Not likely; and how should he explain that he was the grandson—six times over—of her own brother, Dougal? That he was, in fact, not only Jamie's nephew, but her own as well, if a bit further down the family tree than one might expect?

To be polite about it, I'll make a bit of a prediction for you, and say your husband isna like to stray far from your bed.

He touched his cheek, where the darker line of a scar sliced across the ruddy skin; a memento of the scandalous duel that had sent him into exile at Ardsmuir. "God knows what you did to be sent here, Grey," he said, shaking his head. "But for your own sake, I hope you deserved it! Luck to you!" And with a swirl of blue cloak, he was gone.

Accept what there is; don't think about what there is not.

tent for a day and a night. The tent shook and heaved, and voices

He reached into the drawer of his desk, and pulled out my fan, white silk embroidered with violets. "This is yours, I suppose? I found it in the corridor." His mouth twisted wryly as he looked at me. "I see. I suppose, then, you will have some notion of how your appearance earlier this evening affected me." "I doubt it very much," I said.

Is it true - that I won't forget? He paused for a moment, hand on her hair. Aye, that's true, he said softly. But it's true, too, that it willna matter after a time.

You call her 'Dame Blanche,' " Jamie said, between his teeth. "I call her wife! Let her face be the last that ye see, then!

in her voice that

And here I thought I married you because ye had a fair face and a fine fat arse.

Wondered often, if I could call that edge to my service, and sheathe it safe again. For I have seen a great many men grow hard in that calling, and their steel decay to dull iron. And I have wondered often, was I master in my soul, or did I become the slave of my own blade?

All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hidding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.

If a ship's coming in from a port known to have plague of some kind, the damned Hollanders make the sailors swim ashore naked.

The company of plants is always soothing, and after the incessant—well, you couldn't call it sociability, exactly, but at least the incessant presence of people requiring to be conversed with, directed, hectored, scolded, conferred with, persuaded, lied to—that I had experienced over the last few days

something to do with that.

If life was fair, then what?

Still, he always approahed the job with a faint reluctance, disliking the manner of it more than the result. Chopping down a tree for timber was straight-forward; girdling it seemed somehow mean-spirited, if practical, leaving the tree to die slowly, unable to bring water from its roots above the ring ot bare, exposed wood. It was not so unpleasant in the fall, at least, when the trees were dormant and leafless already; it must be rather like dying in their sleep, he thought. Or hoped.

She had dark hair, very wavy, bound back from her brow with a rose-colored ribbon but falling loose down her back, nearly to her waist. He had actually raised a hand to stroke it before catching hold of himself. Then she turned around. Pale skin, big dark eyes, and an oddly knowing look in those eyes when she met his own—which she did, very directly, when he set the third chair down before her. Annalise

He wore his plaid today pinned with a brooch at the shoulder—a beautiful thing his sister had sent him from Scotland, made in the shape of two running stags, bodies bent so that they joined in a circle, heads and tails touching.

Not then. There are things worth dying or starving for—but not words.