Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Oh. It’s Fraser. James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.”

— Diana Gabaldon

102. “A Highlander in full regalia is an impressive sight – any Highlander, no matter how old, ill-favored, or crabbed in appearance. A tall, straight-bodied, and by no means ill-favored young Highlander at close range is breath-taking.”

— Diana Gabaldon

103. “Snow was falling, and winter had come; the season of fire. Candles and hearth fire, that lovely, leaping paradox, that destruction contained but never tamed, held at a safe distance to warm and enchant, but always, still, with that small sense of danger.”

— Diana Gabaldon

104. “If it was killing-and it was- then I thought it not murder, but a justifiable homicide, undertaken in desperate self defense.”

— Diana Gabaldon

105. “I said I was a virgin, not a monk,” he said, kissing me again. “If I find I need guidance, I’ll ask.”

— Diana Gabaldon

106. “All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a.”

— Diana Gabaldon

107. “I’ll thank ye,” said a cool, level voice, “to take your hands off my wife.”

— Diana Gabaldon

108. “My grandsire,′ Jamie observed evenly, ’has by all reports got a character that would enable him to hide conveniently behind a spiral staircase.”

— Diana Gabaldon

109. “But we do not fear silence, for often God speaks loudest in the quiet of our hearts.” And.”

— Diana Gabaldon

110. “Amo, amas, I love a lass, As cedar tall and slender; Sweet cowslip’s grace Is her nominative case, And she’s o’ the feminine gender.”

— Diana Gabaldon

111. “I have yearned always,” he said softly, “for love given and returned; have spent my life in the attempt to give my love to those who were not worthy of it. Allow me this: to give my life for the sake of one who is.”

— Diana Gabaldon

112. “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.”

— Diana Gabaldon

113. “He kissed my forehead gently. “Loving you has put me through hell more than once, Sassenach; I’ll risk it again, if need be.” “Bah,” I said. “And you think loving you has been a bed of roses, do you?” This time he laughed out loud. “No,” he said, “but you’ll maybe keep doing it?” “Maybe I will, at that.” “You’re a verra stubborn woman,” he said, the smile clear in his voice.”

— Diana Gabaldon

114. “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

115. “All right you bloody Scottish bastard, lets see how stubborn you really are.”

— Diana Gabaldon

116. “Damn Frank!” he said ferociously. “Damn all Randalls! Damn Jack Randall, and damn Mary Hawkins Randall, and damn Alex Randall – er, God rest his soul, I mean,” he amended hastily, crossing himself.”

— Diana Gabaldon

117. “Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman’s part to bid them to stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are-or for not coming back.”

— Diana Gabaldon

118. “Ye gave me a child, mo nighean donn,” he said softly, into the cloud of my hair. “We are together for always. She is safe; and we will live forever now, you and I.” He kissed me, very lightly, and laid his head upon the pillow next to me. “Brianna,” he whispered, in that odd Highland way that made the name his own.”

— Diana Gabaldon

119. “He wasn’t a whole person any longer, but only half of something not yet made.”

— Diana Gabaldon

120. “And if your life is a suitable exchange for my honor, why is my honor not a suitable exchange for your life?”

— Diana Gabaldon

121. “Advice? You’re too old to be given it and too young to take it.”

— Diana Gabaldon

122. “I wanted ye from the first I saw ye – but I loved ye when you wept in my arms and let me comfort you, that first time at Leoch.”

— Diana Gabaldon

123. “You know Mountgerald, the big house at the end of the High Street? There’s a ghost there, a workman on the house who was killed as a sacrifice for the foundation. In the eighteenth century sometime; that’s really fairly recent,” he added thoughtfully.”

— Diana Gabaldon

124. “I’m afraid that my wife picked up a number of colorful expressions from the Yanks and such, Frank offered, with a nervous smile. True, I said, gritting my teeth as I wrapped a water-soaked napkin about my hand. Men tend to be very colorful when you’re picking shrapnel out of them.”

— Diana Gabaldon

125. “I gave you justice, it said, as I was taught it. And I gave you mercy, too, so far as I could. While I could not spare you pain and humiliation, I make you a gift of my own pains and humiliations, that yours might be easier to bear.”

— Diana Gabaldon

126. “If,” I said through my teeth, “you ever raise a hand to me again, James Fraser, I’ll cut out your heart and fry it for breakfast!”

— Diana Gabaldon

127. “We come and go from mystery and, in between, we try to forget. But a breeze passing in a still room stirs my hair now and then in soft affection. I think it is my mother.”

— Diana Gabaldon

128. “I estimated the ambient humidity at roughly a thousand percent, but tipped a little of my sweetened coffee into the saucer and blew on it nonetheless.”

— Diana Gabaldon

129. “Nothing moved on the surface but faint coruscations of starlight, caught like fireflies in a spider’s web.”

— Diana Gabaldon

130. “Does it ever stop? The wanting you?” His hand came around to caress my breast. “Even when I’ve just left ye, I want you so much my chest feels tight and my fingers ache with wanting to touch ye again.”

— Diana Gabaldon

131. “IN THE LIGHT OF eternity, time casts no shadow. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. But what is it that the old women see? We see necessity, and we do the things that must be done. Young women don’t see – they are, and the spring of life runs through them. Ours is the guarding of the spring, ours the shielding of the light we have lit, the flame that we are. What have I seen? You are the vision of my youth, the constant dream of all my ages.”

— Diana Gabaldon

132. “I didn’t know what it was about red hair, but many years’ experience with Jamie, Brianna, and Jemmy had taught me that while most people became irritable when hungry, a redheaded person with an empty stomach was a walking time bomb.”

— Diana Gabaldon

133. “Sleep, O sleep in the calm of all calm, Sleep, O sleep in the guidance of guidance, Sleep, O sleep in the love of all loves, Sleep, O beloved, in the Lord of life, Sleep, O beloved, in the God of life! It.”

— Diana Gabaldon

134. “I didn’t want to tell the story of what makes two people come together, although that’s a theme of great power and universality. I wanted to find out what it takes for two people to stay together for fifty years – or more. I wanted to tell not the story of courtship, but the story of marriage.”

— Diana Gabaldon

135. “Fiercely to cherish, softly to guard.”

— Diana Gabaldon

136. “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.”

— Diana Gabaldon

137. “No, the fault lies with the artists,” Claire went on. “The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It’s them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king.”

— Diana Gabaldon

138. “To the taste of breasts like apricots, the warm scent of a woman’s navel when she wakens in the winter, the warmth of a mound that fills your hand like a peach, split with ripeness.”

— Diana Gabaldon

139. “As a mother, I had the lightness now of effort complete, honor satisfied. Mission accomplished.”

— Diana Gabaldon

140. “You alone, hold all my heart, whole in your hands. And you know that.”

— Diana Gabaldon

141. “According to the vicar, many of the local folk thought the War was due in part to people turning away from their roots and omitting to take proper precautions, such as burying a sacrifice under the foundation, that is, or burning fishes’ bones on the hearth – except haddocks, of course,” he added, happily distracted. “You never burn a haddock’s bones – did you know? – or you’ll never catch another. Always bury the bones of a haddock instead.”

— Diana Gabaldon

142. “Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot – but not twice.”

— Diana Gabaldon

143. “Well, I can’t remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three.”

— Diana Gabaldon

144. “There is no more perfect stillness than the solitude in the heart of a snowstorm.”

— Diana Gabaldon

145. “Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far as professional advancement goes.”

— Diana Gabaldon

146. “I 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 makes you yourself and not anyone else. You don’t usually show that bit of yourself to anyone, usually, unless sometimes to someone that ye love greatly.”

— Diana Gabaldon

147. “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.”

— Diana Gabaldon

148. “A standing cock is quite blind, my dear,” he said at last, eyes still shut. “Surely you know that, physician that you are.”

— Diana Gabaldon

149. “Egg-sucking son of a porcupine!”

— Diana Gabaldon

150. “This is the grimoire of the witch, Geillis. It is a witch’s name, and I take it for my own; what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of myself, only what I will become. And.”

— Diana Gabaldon