Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

253. “Healing comes from the healed; not from the physician.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

255. “Lord, he’d said. Let me be enough. That prayer had lodged in my heart like an arrow when I’d heard it and thought he asked for help in doing what had to be done. But that wasn’t what he’d meant at all – and the realization of what he had meant split my heart in two. I took his face between my hands, and wished so much that I had his own gift, the ability to say what lay in my heart, in such a way that he would know. But I hadn’t.”

— Diana Gabaldon

256. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

258. “Dangerous thing, infatuation.”

— Diana Gabaldon

259. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

261. “He said the greatest thing in a man’s life is to lie wi’ a woman he loves,” he said softly. He smiled at me, eyes blue as the sky overhead. “He was right.”

— Diana Gabaldon

262. “When you kissed me like that well maybe you weren’t so sorry to be marrying me after all.”

— Diana Gabaldon

263. “Does it ever stop, Claire? The wanting?”

— Diana Gabaldon

264. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered into my hair. “There’s the two of us now.”

— Diana Gabaldon

265. “Claire knew the flavor of solitude. It was cold as spring water, and not all could drink it; for some it was not refreshment, but mortal chill.”

— Diana Gabaldon

266. “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

267. “I was dead, my Sassenach – and yet all that time, I loved you.”

— Diana Gabaldon

268. “Blood of my Blood,” he whispered, “and bone of my bone. You carry me within ye, Claire, and ye canna leave me now, no matter what happens, You are mine, always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I wilna let ye go.”

— Diana Gabaldon

269. “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

270. “I’m none so brave as I was before, ken?” he said very softly. “Not brave enough to live without ye anymore.”

— Diana Gabaldon

271. “A man killed with a musket was just as dead as one killed with a mortar. It was just that the mortar killed impersonally, destroying dozens of men, while the musket was fired by one man who could see the eyes of the one he killed. That made it murder, it seemed to me, not war. How many men to make a war? Enough, perhaps, so they didn’t really have to see each other?”

— Diana Gabaldon

272. “Scots have long memories, and they’re not the most forgiving of people.”

— Diana Gabaldon

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

283. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

288. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

290. “James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.”

— Diana Gabaldon

291. “He was overcome with a sudden sense of premonition, though he did not believe in premonition. He felt things in motion around him, things that he did not understand and could not control, things settling of themselves into an ordained and appointed position, like the revolving spheres of his father’s orrery – and he wished to protest this state of affairs, but could not.”

— Diana Gabaldon

292. “I always thought it would be a simple matter to lie wi’ a woman, he said softly. And yet... I want to fall on my face at your feet and worship you”-he dropped the towel and reached out, taking me by the shoulders-“and still I want to force ye to your knees before me, and hold ye there wi’ me hands tangled in your hair, and your mouth at my service... and I want both things at the same time, Sassenach.”

— Diana Gabaldon

293. “There is an oath upon her,” he said to Arch, and I realized dimly that he was still speaking in Gaelic, though I understood him clearly. “She may not kill, save it is for mercy or her life. It is myself who kills for her.” “And I,” said a tall figure behind him, softly. Ian. Arch.”

— Diana Gabaldon

294. “It may,” the deeper voice agreed. “It may rain straight up tomorrow instead of down, as well. That doesna mean I’ll stand waiting at the stairhead wi’ my wee bucket turned upside down.”

— Diana Gabaldon

295. “With that height, plus a face of an ugliness so transcendant as to be grotesquely beautiful, it was obvious why she had embraced a religious life – Christ was the only man from whom she might expect embrace in return.”

— Diana Gabaldon

296. “I don’t plot the books out ahead of time, I don’t plan them. I don’t begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don’t work with an outline and I don’t work in a straight line.”

— Diana Gabaldon

297. “Hal swore in German behind him. He must have reached the part about the rifles; German oaths were reserved for the most stringent occasions, French being used for minor things like a burnt dinner, and Latin for formal insults committed to paper. Minnie wouldn’t let either Hal or John swear in English in the house, not wanting the boys to acquire low habits. John could have told her it was too late for such caution but didn’t.”

— Diana Gabaldon

298. “I am what God has made me, and must deal with the Times in which He has placed me.”

— Diana Gabaldon

299. “Aye, lass, courage like that is uncommon rare. It wasna ignorance, mind; he’d just seen two men flogged and he knew the same was coming to him. It’s just he had made up his mind there was no help for it. Boldness in battle is nothing out of the way for a Scotsman, ye ken, but to face down fear in cold blood is rare in any man.”

— Diana Gabaldon

300. “I thought of telling him that his own touch seared my skin and filled my veins with fire. But I was already alight and glowing like a brand. I closed my eyes and felt the kindling touch move to cheek and temple, ear and neck, and shuddered as his hands dropped to my waist and drew me close.”

— Diana Gabaldon