Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Diana Gabaldon

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

256. “It’s always better if they see. Then they don’t imagine things. So I didn’t imagine, I remembered.”

— Diana Gabaldon

257. “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

258. “I prayed all the way up that hill yesterday,” he said softly. “Not for you to stay; I didna think that would be right. I prayed I’d be strong enough to send ye away.”

— Diana Gabaldon

259. “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

260. “Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind – for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it’s a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper.”

— Diana Gabaldon

261. “We had chosen the Highlands as a place to holiday before Frank took up his appointment as a history professor at Oxford, on the grounds that Scotland had been somewhat less touched by the physical horrors of war than the rest of Britain, and was less susceptible to the frenetic postwar gaiety that infected more popular vacation spots.”

— Diana Gabaldon

262. “Sassenach, I’ve been stabbed, bitten, slapped, and whipped since supper – which I didna get to finish. I dinna like to scare children an I dinna like to flog men, and I’ve had to do both. I’ve two hundred English camped three miles away, and no idea what to do about them. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m sore. If you’ve anything like womanly sympathy about ye, I could use a bit!”

— Diana Gabaldon

263. “It was Jamie’s fear that he would lose her – that she would go, swing out into a dark and solitary space without him, unless he could somehow bind her to him, keep her with him. But, Christ, what a risk to take – with a woman so shocked and brutalized, how could he risk it?”

— Diana Gabaldon

264. “Then I laid my head upon his chest and gave my dreams up to his keeping.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

266. “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

267. “It’s only when ye ken ye can say no that it takes courage.”

— Diana Gabaldon

268. “Torn between the impulse to stroke his head, and the urge to cave it in with a rock, I did neither.”

— Diana Gabaldon

269. “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

270. “There were a few faint echoes from the common room two floors below, and a brief flurry of noise and movement, but this served only to emphasize my own isolation.”

— Diana Gabaldon

271. “Have you anything to say to me now, Madam?” he demanded. “Your wig is crooked,” I said, and closed my eyes again.”

— Diana Gabaldon

272. “I found the rooted silence, rushing stream, and rustling leaves balm to the spirit.”

— Diana Gabaldon

273. “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

274. “It starts out the same, but then, after a moment,” he said, speaking softly, “suddenly it’s as though I’ve a living flame in my arms.” His touch grew firmer, outlining my lips and caressing the line of my jaw. “And I want only to throw myself into it and be consumed.”

— Diana Gabaldon

275. “And I have wondered often, was I master in my soul, or did I become the slave of my own blade?”

— Diana Gabaldon

276. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

278. “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

279. “Damn you, Sassenach!” his voice said, from a very great distance. His voice was choked with passion. “Dam you! I swear if ye die on me, I’ll kill you!”

— Diana Gabaldon

280. “I’ve heard it said that a man’s reach must exceed his grasp – or what’s a heaven for?”

— Diana Gabaldon

281. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

283. “Hell was full of clocks, he was sure of it. There was no torment, after all, that could not be exacerbated by a contemplation of time passing. The large case clock at the end of the corridor had a particularly penetrating tick-tock, audiable above and through all the noises of the house. It seemed to Lord John Grey to echo his own heartbeats, each one a step on the road towards death.”

— Diana Gabaldon

284. “The dog would run a few steps toward the house, circle once or twice as though unable to decide what to do next, then run back into the wood, turn, and run again toward the house, all the while whining with agitation, tail low and wavering. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. “Bloody Timmy’s in the well!” I.”

— Diana Gabaldon

285. “Alive and one. We are one, and while we love, death will never touch us.”

— Diana Gabaldon

286. “He was not afraid to die with her, by fire or any other way – only to live without her.”

— Diana Gabaldon

287. “Probably from Norse roots. There’s a lot of the Norse influence round here, and all the way up the coast to the West. Some of the place names are Norse, you know, not Gaelic at all.”

— Diana Gabaldon

288. “And his release began, deep inside me, without his moving, shivering through his body so that his arms trembled, the ruddy hairs quivering in the dim light, and he dropped his head with a sound like a sob, his hair hiding his face as he spilled himself, each jerk and pulse of his flesh between my legs rousing an echo in my own.”

— Diana Gabaldon

289. “And then later, at the funeral, members of the family, followed by the tenants and then the servants, had come one by one to add a stone each to the weight of remembrance.”

— Diana Gabaldon

290. “She sounded as though love were an unfortunate but unavoidable condition.”

— Diana Gabaldon

291. “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

292. “And so he and Ian – who, it turned out, could also knit and was prostrated by mirth at my lack of knowledge – had taught me the simple basics of knit and purl, explaining, between snorts of derision over my efforts, that in the Highlands all boys were routinely taught to knit, that being a useful occupation well suited to the long idle hours of herding sheep or cattle on the shielings.”

— Diana Gabaldon

293. “Do women hold back the evolution of such things as freedom and other social ideals, out of fear for themselves or their children? Or do they in fact inspire such things – and the risks required to reach them – by providing the things worth fighting for? Not merely fighting to defend, either, but to propel forward, for a man wanted more for his children than he would ever have.”

— Diana Gabaldon

294. “Why not? I wanted to say. Because you didn’t know her, she was nothing to you. Because you were already hurt. Because it takes something rather special in the way of guts to stand up in front of a crowd and let someone hit you in the face, no matter what your motive.”

— Diana Gabaldon

295. “Escorted by Murtagh, who was disguised as my groom, I had barely made it out of sight of the prison before sliding off my horse and being sick in the snow.”

— Diana Gabaldon

296. “He said, ‘If you’re sizable, half the men ye meet will fear ye, and the other half will want to try ye. Knock one down,’ he said, ‘and the rest will let ye be. But learn to do it fast and clean, or you’ll be fightin’ all your life.’ So he’d take me to the barn and knock me into the straw until I learned to hit back.”

— Diana Gabaldon

297. “What a mystery blood was – how did a tiny gesture, a tome of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of flesh? He had seen it again and again, watching his nieces and nephews grow, and accepted without thought the ehoes of parent and grandparent that appeared for brief moments. the shadow of a face looking back through the years – that vanished again into the face that was now.”

— Diana Gabaldon

298. “What is it about ye, Sassenach, I wonder?” he said conversationally, eyes still fixed on Myers. “What is what about me?” He turned then, and gave me a narrow eye. “What it is that makes every man ye meet want to take off his breeks within five minutes of meetin’ ye.”

— Diana Gabaldon

299. “It’s what happens when you live through things you shouldn’t have been able to live through and can’t reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.”

— Diana Gabaldon

300. “All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death the key to the gate that bars memory.”

— Diana Gabaldon