Quotes About Identity

Ian—is that by chance Ian Murray?" Grey asked, but then answered himself. "I suppose it must be; how many Mohawks can there be named Ian?

think it's as though everyone has a small place inside themselves, maybe, a private bit that they keep to themselves. It's like a little fortress, where the most private part of you lives—maybe it's your soul, maybe just that bit that makes you yourself and not anyone else.

Once I had thought I was whole -- had seemed to be able to love a man, to bear a child, to heal the sick--and know that all these things were natural parts of me, not the difficult, troubled fragments into which my life had now disintegrated. But that had been in the past, the man I had loved was Jamie, and for a time, I had been part of something greater than myself.

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.

Oh. It's Fraser. James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.

For so many years, he said, for so long, I have been so many things, so many different men.... But here, he said so softly I could barely hear him, here in the dark, with you.... I have no name. I lifted my face toward his, and took the warm breath of him between my own lips. I love you, I said, and did not need to tell him how I meant it.

James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, I said, spacing the words, formally, the way Jamie had spoken them to me when he first told me his full name on the day of our wedding.

By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.

It gave him the same odd sense of dislocation, though; that sense of losing some valuable part of himself that could not survive the passage back to daily life. Each time, the passage became more difficult.

Soldiers manage by dividing themselves. They're one man in the killing, another at home, and the man that dandles his bairn on his knee has nothing to do wi' the man who crushed his enemy's throat with his boot, so he tells himself, sometimes successfully.

The woman crosses the room, and it is only when she is directly in front of us that I am certain about who she is. She is dressed in a pelisse fashionable among women half her age, and the feather in her hat is an extraordinary shade of blue. Outside, a young man is waiting at her coach. Passersby will suspect that he is her son, but anyone who has ever been acquainted with her will know better.

For a moment, I saw him as he had looked the morning I married him. Duine uasal was what he looked, a man of worth. But the bold face above the lace was the same, older now, but wiser with it—yet the tilt of his shining head and the set of the wide, firm mouth, the slanted clear cat-eyes that looked into my own, were just the same. Here was a man who had always known his worth.

If God makes man in His image, we all return the favor.

He wasn't a whole person any longer, but only half of something not yet made.

Is that you, Geordie?" he asked, not turning around. He was dressed in shirt and breeches, and had a small tool of some kind in his hand, with which he was doing something to the innards of the press. "Took ye long enough. Did ye get the—" "It isn't Geordie," I said. My voice was higher than usual. "It's me," I said.

I am, madam, Jonathan Randall, Esquire, Captain of His Majesty's Eighth Dragoons. At your service, madam.

The flame of Brianna's head moved slightly, looking from one to the other, and I saw what she saw; the echo of Jamie's dangerous stillness in Roger. It was both unexpected and shocking; I had never seen any resemblance between them at all—and yet at the moment they might have been day and dark, images of fire and night, each mirroring the other. MacKenzie

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.

But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am," and forms the core of personality.

More than most men, he valued his name-I only hoped that given time, it would once more have value.

Jamie was real, alright, more real than anything had ever been to me, even Frank and my life in 1945. Jamie, tender lover and perfidious blackguard.

Would it be better if I'd had daughters?" she asked the mirror, in apparent earnestness. "No," she answered herself. "They'd only marry men, and there you are.

It's like a little fortress, where the most private part of you lives - maybe it's your soul, maybe just that bit that makes you yourself and not anyone else.

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. Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence.