Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Ye need not be scairt of me,” he said softly. “Nor anyone here, so long as I’m with ye.” – Jaime.”

— Diana Gabaldon

202. “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.”

— Diana Gabaldon

203. “The man that takes her in unholy embrace will have his privates blasted like a frostbitten apple,” he said, with relish, “and his soul will burn forever in hell.” He bared his teeth at his grandfather, and drew back his hand. “Like this.” The beechwood teeth landed in the midst of the fire with a plop, and at once began to sizzle.”

— Diana Gabaldon

204. “That’s for calling your father a fool. It may be true, but it’s disrespectful. Brian Fraser to teenage Jamie.”

— Diana Gabaldon

205. “It’s a rare plant,” he said, touching the sprig in my open hand. “Flowers, fruit and leaves all together at the one time. The white flowers are for honor, and red fruit for courage – and the green leaves are for constancy.”

— Diana Gabaldon

206. “He shook his head slowly from side to side, as though it were very heavy. I could almost hear the contents sloshing.”

— Diana Gabaldon

207. “For I hadn’t stood frozen at the revelation of Geilie’s pregnancy. It was something else I had seen that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. As Geilie had spun, white arms stretched aloft, I saw what she had seen when my own clothes were stripped away. A mark on one arm like the one I bore. Here, in this time, the mark of sorcery, the mark of a magus. The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination.”

— Diana Gabaldon

208. “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

209. “Leaving me to plant the rest of the garlic, Mrs. Fitz sailed away like a galleon, young Alec bobbing in her wake. I worked contentedly through the morning, planting garlic, pinching back dead flower heads, digging out weeds and carrying on the gardener’s never-ending battle against snails, slugs, and similar pests. Here, though, the battle was waged bare-handed, with no assistance from chemical antipest compounds.”

— Diana Gabaldon

210. “And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours, Claire – I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you. – Jamie.”

— Diana Gabaldon

211. “Claire. The name knifed across his heart with a pain that was more racking than anything his body had ever been called on to withstand.”

— Diana Gabaldon

212. “He hadn’t worn the kilt since Culloden, but his body had not forgotten the way of it.”

— Diana Gabaldon

213. “We stood wrapped in each other’s arms, taking comfort from our family below, yearning for the others we might never see again, at once at home and homeless, balanced on a knife edge of danger and uncertainty. But together.”

— Diana Gabaldon

214. “My parents would take my sister and me out for dinner now and then, and while waiting for the food to be served, would point out the oldest, most harried looking waitress in the place, saying sternly, “Be sure you get a good education, so you don’t have to do that when you’re fifty!”

— Diana Gabaldon

215. “The greatest burden lies in caring for those we cannot help.”

— Diana Gabaldon

216. “He touched the rough crucifix that lay against his chest and whispered to the moving air, “Lord, that she might be safe, she and my children.” Then turned his cheek to her reaching hand and touched her throught the veils of time.”

— Diana Gabaldon

217. “To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct. And I feared I did not have it, and fearing, was ashamed.”

— Diana Gabaldon

218. “I prayed all the way up that hill yesterday; not for you to stay; I didna think that would be right. I prayed I’d be strong enough to send ye away. I said, “Lord, if I’ve ever had courage in my life before, let me have it now. Let me be brave enough and not fall to my knees and beg her to stay.”

— Diana Gabaldon

219. “BILIOUS HUMOURS.”

— Diana Gabaldon

220. “Please,” she said, “don’t mention Jamie Fraser to my daughter.”

— Diana Gabaldon

221. “Well, my mother told me I’d be some lassie’s choice one fine day.” He reached down a hand and helped me up. “I told her,” he continued, “that I thought it was the man’s part to choose.” “And what did she say to that?” I asked. “She rolled her eyes and said ‘You’ll find out, my fine wee cockerel, you’ll find out.’ ” He laughed. “And so I have.”

— Diana Gabaldon

222. “I loved Frank... I loved him alot. But by that time, Jamie was my heart and the breath of my body. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t.”

— Diana Gabaldon

223. “Idleness would have seemed not only a sign of moral decay, but an affront to the natural order of things.”

— Diana Gabaldon

224. “Stones of protection; amethyst, emerald, turquoise, lapis lazuli, and a male ruby.”

— Diana Gabaldon

225. “I was born for you,” I simply said, and held out my arms to him.”

— Diana Gabaldon

226. “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

227. “As yet too hungry and too clumsy for tenderness, still he made love with a sort of unflagging joy that made me think that male virginity might be a highly underrated commodity.”

— Diana Gabaldon

228. “Frank made a face; an Englishman to the bone, he would rather lap water out of the toilet than drink tea made from teabags. The Lipton’s had been left by Mrs. Grossman, the weekly cleaning woman, who thought tea made from loose leaves messy and disgusting.”

— Diana Gabaldon

229. “Scots have long memories, and they’re not the most forgiving of people. There’s a clan stone out there with the name of MacKenzie carved on it, and a good many of my relatives under it. I don’t feel quite so personal about it as some, but I haven’t forgotten either. – Roger MacKenzie Wakefield.”

— Diana Gabaldon

230. “It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.”

— Diana Gabaldon

231. “I relaxed my grip on the knife; she could hardly attack me with a lapful of goat.”

— Diana Gabaldon

232. “Pointless to spend too much time in planning, anyway, given the propensity of life to make sudden left-hand turns without warning.”

— Diana Gabaldon

233. “While Fergus was possessed of dark good looks and a dashing manner that might well win a young girl’s heart, he lacked a few of the things that might appeal somewhat more to conservative Scottish parents, such as property, income, a left hand, and a last name.”

— Diana Gabaldon

234. “I’ve yet to see the auld woman believes in witches, nor the young one, neither. It’s men think there must be ill-wishes and magic in women, when it’s only the natural way of the creatures.”

— Diana Gabaldon

235. “When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.”

— Diana Gabaldon

236. “I could feel his heart beating against my ribs, and wanted nothing more than to stay there forever, not moving, not making love, just breathing the same air.”

— Diana Gabaldon

237. “I am a Highlander,” Jamie said bleakly. He glanced once more at the far bank, where occasional glimpses of tartan showed through the mist, and then back. The shouting echoed from the fog. “And I am the sire of Americans.”

— Diana Gabaldon

238. “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

239. “People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.”

— Diana Gabaldon

240. “It’s the anonymity of the war that makes the killing possible. When the nameless dead are named again on tombstone and on cenotaph, then they regain the identity they lost as soldiers, and take their place in grief and memory, the ghosts of sons and lovers.”

— Diana Gabaldon

241. “To have ye with me again, to talk wi’ you, to know I can say anything, not guard my words or hide my thoughts. God, Sassenach the Lord knows I am as lust-crazed as a lad, and I canna keep my hands from you, or anything else. But I would count that all well lost, had no more than the pleasure of havin’ ye by me, and to tell ye all my heart.”

— Diana Gabaldon

242. “I felt deeply betrayed that the man I depended on as friend, protector, and lover intended to do such a thing to me. And my sense of self-preservation was quietly terrified at the thought of submitting myself to the mercies of someone who handled a fifteen-pound claymore as though it were a flywhisk.”

— Diana Gabaldon

243. “It was not Monsieur Arouet, but a colleague of his – a lady novelist – who remarked to me once that writing novels was a cannibal’s art, in which one often mixed small portions of one’s friends and one’s enemies together, seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a savory concoction.”

— Diana Gabaldon

244. “In bed,” she said calmly. “I want you to come to bed with me.”

— Diana Gabaldon

245. “To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct.”

— Diana Gabaldon

246. “Only a raid, Sassenach. I’ve been doin’ that since I was fourteen. It’s only in fun, ye see; it’s different when you’re up against someone who really means to kill ye.” “Fun,” I said, a little faintly. “Yes, quite.”

— Diana Gabaldon

247. “Men hate things to change,” her mother had once casually told her. “Unless it’s their idea, of course. But you can make them think it is their idea, sometimes.”

— Diana Gabaldon

248. “A conclusion is simply the point at which you give up thinking. He gave up, and as he rose stiffly to his feet, found that a conclusion had indeed formed itself in his mind, much as a pearl forms inside an oyster.”

— Diana Gabaldon

249. “Lord that she might be safe. She and my children.”

— Diana Gabaldon

250. “Owls are keepers of the dead, but not just the dead. They’re messengers between worlds.”

— Diana Gabaldon