Diana Gabaldon Quotes

A peaceful refuge in which to rediscover each other, we thought,, not realizing that, while golf and fishing are Scotland's most popular outdoor sports, gossip is the most popular indoor sport.
Diana Gabaldon
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.
Diana Gabaldon
#Outlander QOTD Claire and Master Raymond.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.
Diana Gabaldon
It's a good country for myths. Things seem to take root here.
Diana Gabaldon
Ian, man, I didna tell ye because I didna wish to lose you too. My brother was gone, and my father. I didna mean to lose my own heart's blood as well. For you are dearer to me even than home and family, love.'She cast a lopsided smile at Jamie. 'And that's saying quite a bit.
Diana Gabaldon
Blessed are those who eat greens, for they shall keep their teeth. Blessed are those who wash their hands after wiping their arses, for they shall not sicken. Blessed are those who boil water, for they shall be called saviors of mankind.
Diana Gabaldon
Intimacy and romance are not synonymous.
Diana Gabaldon
So now it's space and time," he said. "You ever watch Doctor Who on PBS?""All the time," she said dryly, "on the BBC. And don't think I wouldn't sell my soul for a TARDIS.
Diana Gabaldon
He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the circumstances.
Diana Gabaldon
For the moment, everything had disappeared: the church, the battle, the screams and shouts and the rumble of limber wheels along the rutted road through Freehold. There wasn't anything but her and him, and he opened his eyes to look on her face, to fix it in his mind forever.
Diana Gabaldon
Jamie reached across and took my right hand in his, his fingers linking with mine, and the silver of my ring shone red in the glow of the flames. I looked up into his face and saw the promise spoken in his eyes, as it was in mine.“As long as we both shall live.
Diana Gabaldon
Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth.
Diana Gabaldon
Time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is-in the blink of an eye, a mother can see the child again as they were when they were born, when they learned how to walk, as they were at any age-at any time, even when the child is fully grown or a parent themselves.
Diana Gabaldon
Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.
Diana Gabaldon
After all, I thought, what were days and weeks in the presence of eternity?
Diana Gabaldon
God, don't laugh!" Jamie said, alarmed. "I didna mean to make ye laugh! Christ, Jenny will kill me if ye cough up a lung and die out here!
Diana Gabaldon
You have lost your mind,"Jamie said coldly, the shock receding slightly. "Or I should think you had, if ye had one to lose.
Diana Gabaldon
That's the best thing I can think of. Having a good hold on your arse always makes me feel steady.
Diana Gabaldon
Now, me lord, you know you oughtn’t talk like that at this hour of the morning. Yougot to pardon his lordship, sir,” he said apologetically to Jones. “His father—theduke, you know—had him schooled in logic. He can’t really help it, like.” Spoken by a most loyal valet, Tom Bryd, in defense of the inherit workings of the mind of his employer, Lord John Grey
Diana Gabaldon
He wasn't a whole person any longer, but only half of something not yet made.
Diana Gabaldon
...seeking refuge from a world in which huge and mysterious forces were let loose to destruction.
Diana Gabaldon
If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle.
Diana Gabaldon
Roger speaking to Brianna: It's too important. You don't forget having a dad."You do remember your father?"No. I remember yours.
Diana Gabaldon
At the best of times, Father Bain's face resembled a clenched fist.
Diana Gabaldon
A hedgehog? And just how does a hedgehog make love?" he demanded. No, I thought. I won't. I will not. But I did. "Very carefully," I replied, giggling helplessly. So now we know just how old that one is, I thought.
Diana Gabaldon
Lying on the floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eigh­teenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men.
Diana Gabaldon
If I die," he whispered in the dark, "dinna follow me. The bairns will need ye. Stay for them. I can wait.
Diana Gabaldon
...knowing what o'clock it is gives ye the illusion that ye have some control over your circumstances.
Diana Gabaldon
Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…
Diana Gabaldon
Brave' covers everything from complete insanity and bloody disregard of other people's lives - generals tend to go in for that sort - to drunkenness, foolhardiness, and outright idiocy - to the sort of thing that will make a man sweat and tremble and throw up . . . and go and do what he thinks he has to do anyway.
Diana Gabaldon
I put back my head, looking up at the deep black sky swimming with hot stars. If you knew they were really balls of flaming gas, you could imagine them as Van Gogh saw them, without difficulty . . . and looking into that illuminated void, you understood why people have always looked up into the sky when talking to God. You need to feel the immensity of something very much bigger than yourself, and there it is - immeasurably vast, and always near at hand. Covering you.
Diana Gabaldon
Mo Nighean donn," he whispered," mo chridhe. My brown lass, my heart."Come to me. Cover me. Shelter me. a bhean, heal me. Burn with me, as I burn for you.
Diana Gabaldon
I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rotting bull. I dinna understand myself.
Diana Gabaldon
Alive, and one. We are one, and while we love, death will never touch us. 'The grave's a fine and private place/ but none, I think, do there embrace.
Diana Gabaldon
There were moments, of course. Those small spaces in time, too soon gone, when everything seems to stand still, and existence is balanced on a perfect point, like the moment of change between the dark and the light, and when both and neither surround you.
Diana Gabaldon
Nay, he needs a woman, not a girl. And Laoghaire will be a girl when she’s fifty.
Diana Gabaldon
For so many years, 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.
Diana Gabaldon
My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too -- enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser
Diana Gabaldon
I had kissed my share of men, particularly during the war years, when flirtation and instant romance were the light-minded companions of death and uncertainty. Jamie, thought, was something different. His extreme gentleness was in no way tentative; rather it was a promise of power known and held in leash; a challenge and a provocation the more remarkable for its lack of demand. I am yours, it said. And if you will have me, then..
Diana Gabaldon
And I have wondered often, was I master in my soul, or did I become the slave of my own blade?
Diana Gabaldon
Would he ever come back? He wondered. The water filled his ears with its own rush, and he was comforted by the realization that, in fact, he never left.
Diana Gabaldon
The law's a necessary evil--we canna be doing without it--but do ye not think it a poor substitute for conscience?
Diana Gabaldon
He has cat blood, I reflected sourly, no doubt that was how he managed to sneak up on me in the darkness.
Diana Gabaldon
No matter how ugly the manner in which a man dies, it’s only the presence of a suffering human soul that is horrifying, once gone, what is left is only an object.
Diana Gabaldon
You forget the life you had before, after awhile. Things you cherish and hold dear are like pearls on a string. Cut the knot and they scatter across the floor, rolling into dark corners never to be found again. So you move on, and eventually you forget what the pearls even looked like. At least, you try.
Diana Gabaldon
True, the body's easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled - yet there's that in a man that is never destroyed.
Diana Gabaldon
I've seen women-and men too, sometimes-as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna make such good matches with those who can.
Diana Gabaldon
The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath, and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint witness to the glory of what was.
Diana Gabaldon
Still, he was pleased to know that he could recall so much of the play and passed the rest of the journey pleasantly in reciting lines to himself, being careful not to snort.
Diana Gabaldon
It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.
Diana Gabaldon
And I tell you what, L.J.; you see all these people you haven't seen for twenty years, and there's this split second when you meet somebody you used to know, and you think 'My God, he's changed!,'and then all of a sudden, he hasn't- it's just like the twenty years weren't there, I mean" he rubbed his head vigorously, struggling for meaning--"you see they've got some gray, and some lines, and maybe they aren't just the same as they were, but two minutes past that shock, and you don't see it anymore. They are just the same people they always were, and you have to make yourself stand back a ways to see that they aren't eighteen anymore
Diana Gabaldon
When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind.It was because I couldn't bring myself believe that that perfect smooth expanse was no more than I thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of a tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far-down depths.And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep, and think instead that the puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at once, and keep on falling, on and on, into blue space.The only time I would dare walk though a puddle was at twilight, when the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted pinprick there, I could slash through unafraid--for if I should fall into the puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be safe.Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts--though my feet do not--then hurries on, with only the echo of the though left b
Diana Gabaldon
The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past its walls, and thought that, if I reached down, I could feel Adso's soft gray fur under my fingers. I swallowed, hard.
Diana Gabaldon
All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death is the key to the gate that bars memory.
Diana Gabaldon
I know what it felt . . . like when I . . . thought you were dead, and-" A small gasp for breath, and her eyes locked on his. "And I wouldn't do that to you." Her bosom fell and her eyes closed.It was a long moment before he could speak."Thank ye, Sassenach," he whispered, and held her small, cold hand between his own and watched her breathe until the moon rose.
Diana Gabaldon
During his time with the French army, years before, one of the sergeants had explained to the younger mercenaries the trick of falling asleep the night before a battle. "Make yourself comfortable, examine your conscience, and make a good Act of Contrition. Father Hugo says that in time of war, even if there is no priest to shrive you, your sins can be forgiven this way. Since you cannot commit sins while asleep--not even you, Simenon!--you will awake in a state of grace, ready to fall on the bastards. And with nothing to look forward to but victory or heaven-- how can you be afraid.
Diana Gabaldon
I had not slept with many men other than my husband, but I noticed before that to sleep, actually sleep with someone did give this sense of intimacy, as though your dreams had flowed out of you to mingle with his and fold you both in a blanket of unconsciousness knowing. A throwback of some kind, I thought. In older, more primitive times, it was an act of trust to sleep in the presence of another person. If the trust was mutual, simple sleep could bring you closer together than joining the bodies.
Diana Gabaldon
He reached out a long arm and drew me in, holding me close against him. I put my arms around him and felt the quiver of his muscles, exhausted, and the sheer hard strength still in him, that would hold him up, no matter how tired he might be. We stood quite still for some time, my cheek against his chest and his face against my hair, drawing strength from each other for whatever might come next. Being married.
Diana Gabaldon
Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.
Diana Gabaldon
But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.
Diana Gabaldon