Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “That’s for calling your father a fool. It may be true, but it’s disrespectful. Brian Fraser to teenage Jamie.”

— Diana Gabaldon

202. “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

203. “And a long time,” he said. “I am a jealous man, but not a vengeful one. I would take you from him, my Sassenach – but I wouldna take him from you.”

— Diana Gabaldon

204. “Do ye want me to be a horse, a bear, or a dog?” “A hedgehog.” “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

208. “BILIOUS HUMOURS.”

— Diana Gabaldon

209. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

212. “I am deeply indebted to many people who have shared their love of and insights into these remarkable books with me over the years, none more than Jessica Matthews of George Mason University.”

— Diana Gabaldon

213. “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

214. “Turd-eating son of a flying tortoise.”

— Diana Gabaldon

215. “There’s a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “I read all the time. People ask, ‘Do you read while you work?’ And I say, ‘I better.’ I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can’t go that long without reading.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “For if you feel for me as i do for you – then I am asking you to tear out your heart and live without it.”

— Diana Gabaldon

235. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

237. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

246. “I knelt at Ellen’s feet, as I kneel now by yours, And I swore to her by the name o’ the threefold God, that I would follow ye always, to do your bidding, and guard your back, when ye became a man grown, and needing such service. Aye, lad. I do cherish ye as the son of my own loins.”

— Diana Gabaldon

247. “Superstition and sensation are always so much more appealing than truth and rationality. The.”

— Diana Gabaldon

248. “You’re real,” he whispered. I had thought him pale already. Now all vestiges of color drained from his face.”

— Diana Gabaldon

249. “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.”

— Diana Gabaldon

250. “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