Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “It’s strange,” he said, “when he was alive, I didna pay him much heed. But once he was dead, the things he’d told me had a good deal more influence.”

— Diana Gabaldon

452. “It wasn’t that Friends thought that the Lord spoke only to them; it was only that they weren’t sure other folk listened very often.”

— Diana Gabaldon

453. “All over the clearing, the same thing was happening; the women gave not an inch, but their men stepped out before them. Anyone coming into the clearing would think that the women had melted into invisibility, leaving an implacable phalanx of Scotsmen staring down the glen.”

— Diana Gabaldon

454. “The rest of the journey passed uneventfully, if you consider it uneventful to ride fifteen miles on horseback through rough country at night, frequently without benefit of roads, in company with kilted men armed to the teeth, and sharing a horse with a wounded man. At least we were not set upon by highwaymen, we encountered no wild beasts, and it didn’t rain. By the standards I was becoming used to, it was quite dull.”

— Diana Gabaldon

455. “Being in a state of grace is all very well, but I imagine even Joan of Arc had qualms when they lit the first brand.”

— Diana Gabaldon

456. “Women, as he had explained to me at the paddock, have no natural appreciation for horses, and are therefore difficult to talk to.”

— Diana Gabaldon

457. “No, my Sassenach”, he said softly. “Open your eyes. Look at me. For that is your punishment, as it is mine. See what you have done to me, as I have done to you. Look at me.”

— Diana Gabaldon

458. “Is thee afraid of me, Rachel?” he whispered. “I am,” she whispered back, and closed her hand on his wounded shoulder, lightly but hard enough for him to feel the hurt of it. “And I am afraid for thee, as well. But there are things I fear much more than death – and to be without thee is what I fear most.”

— Diana Gabaldon

459. “He splayed a hand out over the photographs, trembling fingers not quite touching the shiny surface, and then he turned and leaned toward me, slowly, with the improbable grace of a tall tree falling. He buried his face in my shoulder and went very quietly and thoroughly to pieces.”

— Diana Gabaldon

460. “Be careful, Sassenach,” he said, still grinning. “Ye dinna want to knock off any more pieces; ye’ll only have to stick them back on, aye?”

— Diana Gabaldon

461. “I wept bitterly, surrendering momentarily to my fear and heartbroken confusion, but slowly I began to quiet a bit, as Jamie stroked my neck and back, offering me the comfort of his broad, warm chest. My sobs lessened and I began to calm myself, leaning tiredly into the curve of his shoulder. No wonder he was so good with horses, I thought blearily, feeling his fingers rubbing gently behind my ears, listening to the soothing, incomprehensible speech. If I were a horse, I’d let him ride me anywhere.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

463. “Some were in Gaelic and some in English, used apparently according to which language best fitted the rhythm of the words, for all of them had a beauty to the speaking, beyond the content of the tale itself.”

— Diana Gabaldon

464. “So ye’ve come back to him,” he said happily. “God, that’s romantic!”

— Diana Gabaldon

465. “But as spring blooms, the birds grow drunk with love and the bushes riot with their songs. Far, far into the night, darkness mutes but does not silence them, and small melodious conversations break out at all hours, invisible and strangely intimate in the dead of night, as though one overheard the lovemaking of strangers in the room next door.”

— Diana Gabaldon

466. “He looked like Bree, didn’t he? He was like her?” “Yes.” He breathed heavily, almost a snort. “I could see it in your face – when you’d look at her, I could see you thinking of him. Damn you, Claire Beauchamp,” he said, very softly.”

— Diana Gabaldon

467. “Its appearance was greeted with cries of rapture, and following a brief struggle over possesion of the volume, William rescued it before it should be torn to pieces, but allowed himself to be induced to read some of the passages aloud, his dramatic rendering being greeted by wolflike howls of enthusiasim and hails of live pits.”

— Diana Gabaldon

468. “Och, I want them frightened of me, Sassenach. It’s the only way I’ll have a chance of bringing them out of it alive.”

— Diana Gabaldon

469. “There was a sudden whoosh from above, followed immediately by a blur before my eyes and a dull thud. Captain Randall was on the ground at my feet, under a heaving mass that looked like a bundle of old plaid rags. A brown, rocklike fist rose out of the mass and descended with considerable force, meeting decisively with some bony protuberance, by the sound of the resultant crack. The Captain’s struggling legs, shiny in tall brown boots, relaxed quite suddenly. I.”

— Diana Gabaldon

470. “Black Jack. A common name for rogues and scoundrels in the eighteenth century. A staple of romantic fiction, the name conjured up charming highwaymen, dashing blades in plumed hats. The reality waled at my side.”

— Diana Gabaldon

471. “With vivid memories of the last IRS form, I had signed, I agreed sympathetically that a two percent tax rate was a positive outrage, wondering to myself just what had become of the fiery spirit of American taxpayers over the intervening two hundred years.”

— Diana Gabaldon

472. “My marriage to Jamie had been for me like the turning of a great key, each small turn setting in the intricate fall of tumblers within me. Bree had been able to turn that key as well, edging closer to the unlocking of the door of myself. But the final turn of the lock was frozen – until I had walked into the print shop in Edinburgh, and the mechanism had sprung free with a final, decisive click.”

— Diana Gabaldon

473. “Did ye know that the silkies put aside their skins when they come ashore, and walk like men? And if ye find a silkie’s skin and hide it, he – or she – ” he added, fairly, “canna go into the sea again, but must stay with ye on the land.”

— Diana Gabaldon

474. “It was a blur,” people say. What they really mean is the impossibility of anyone truly entering such an experience from outside, the futility of explanation.”

— Diana Gabaldon

475. “The thing was, some men needed killing. The Church didn’t admit that, save it was war. The Mohawk understood it fine. So did Uncle Jamie.”

— Diana Gabaldon

476. “Christ, was he going to die in public, in a pleasure garden, in the company of a sodomite spy dressed like a rooster?”

— Diana Gabaldon

477. “The words were before him, and yet I thought he wasn’t reading them from the paper, but from the pages of his memory, from the open book of his heart.”

— Diana Gabaldon

478. “God kens well enough that boys need to be smacked, or he’d no fill them sae full o’ the de’il.”

— Diana Gabaldon

479. “Papist, and whether I found the word of God any comfort or not, at least I could compare my troubles with Job’s.” He laughed. “Oddly enough, it was some comfort. Our Lord had to put up wi’ being scourged too; and I could reflect that at least I wasna going to be hauled out and crucified.”

— Diana Gabaldon

480. “Don’t cry, Sassenach,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him.”

— Diana Gabaldon

481. “A man’s life had to have more purpose than only to feed himself each day.”

— Diana Gabaldon

482. “Really rather fascinating, you know,” he confided, and I recognized, with an internal sigh, the song of the scholar, as identifying a sound as the terr-whit! of a thrush. Harking to the call of a kindred spirit, Frank at once settled down to the mating dance of academe, and they were soon neck-deep in archetypes and the parallels between ancient superstitions and modern religions. I shrugged and made my own way through the crowd to the bar and back, a large brandy-and-splash in each hand.”

— Diana Gabaldon

483. “I had seen even well-established marriages shatter under the strain of smaller things. And those that did not shatter, but were crippled by mistrust.”

— Diana Gabaldon

484. “Evidently, women are capable of experiencing rational thought and sexual arousal simultaneously, because I appeared to be doing precisely that.”

— Diana Gabaldon

485. “Go down,” she said, “and tell them the MacKenzies are here.”

— Diana Gabaldon

486. “He could not help himself; whether it brought him comfort or misery, he felt he had no choice now but to speak of Fraser – and Quarry was the only man in London to whom he could so speak.”

— Diana Gabaldon

487. “I couldn’t think how long it had been since I had read a novel. And in the daytime! Feeling pleasantly wicked, I sat by the open window in my surgery and resolutely entered a world far from my own.”

— Diana Gabaldon

488. “He experienced that peculiar crawling of the flesh that attends any child’s sudden realization that a parent must not only have engaged at some comfortably primeval date in the theoretical carnal act that resulted in his own existence – but was capable of doing it again in the all-too-physical present.”

— Diana Gabaldon

489. “Open your eyes and tell me yourself, Sassenash,” said a deep urgent voice somewhere close.”

— Diana Gabaldon

490. “It wasn’t a very.”

— Diana Gabaldon

491. “It wasn’t a thing I had consciously missed, but having it now reminded me of the joy of it; that drowsy intimacy in which a man’s body is accessible to you as your own, the strange shapes and textures of it like a sudden extension of your own limbs.”

— Diana Gabaldon

492. “But even things that heal leave scars.”

— Diana Gabaldon

493. “Well, legends are many-legged beasties, aye? But they generally have at least one foot on the truth.”

— Diana Gabaldon

494. “I am a warrior, that my son may be a merchant – and his son may be a poet.”

— Diana Gabaldon

495. “Bodies under the foundation, though – that’s where a lot of the local ghosts come from.”

— Diana Gabaldon

496. “Jamie felt a strong desire to go across and see what the open books were, to go to the shelves and run his knuckles gently over the leather and wood and buckrum of the bindings until a book should speak to him and come willingly into his hand.”

— Diana Gabaldon

497. “He had enough experience in the business of prayer to recognize an answer when it showed up, though, however unwelcome.”

— Diana Gabaldon

498. “Do not forget to entertain strangers,” Buck said in the same language, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

— Diana Gabaldon

499. “Might he ever see Jamie Fraser again? There was a good chance he would not. If chance did not kill him, cowardice might. The mania of confession was on him; best make the most of it. His quill had dried; he did not dip it again. I love you, he wrote, the strokes light and fast, making scarcely a mark upon the paper, with no ink. I wish it were not so. Then he rose, scooped up the scribbled papers, and, crushing them into a ball, threw them into the fire.”

— Diana Gabaldon

500. “If either of them stops shouting long enough to hear the other, they’ll be hurting each other’s feelings.”

— Diana Gabaldon