Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “A sadist with a sense of humor was particularly dangerous.”

— Diana Gabaldon

252. “Often the best tool is the most dangerous. One doesn’t hesitate to use it on that account; one merely makes sure to take adequate precautions.”

— Diana Gabaldon

253. “Some people can leave their bodies and travel miles away,” she said, staring meditatively at the page. “Other people see them out wandering, and recognize them, and ye can bloody prove they were really tucked up safe in bed at the time. I’ve seen the records, all the eyewitness testimony. Some people have stigmata ye can see and touch – I’ve seen one. But not everybody. Only certain people.” She.”

— Diana Gabaldon

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

260. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

265. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

268. “Dangerous thing, infatuation.”

— Diana Gabaldon

269. “You are a rather remarkable woman,” he said at last, in a level tone. “Indeed,” I said, not looking up. “In what way?” He leaned back; I heard the rustle of his bedding. “You are neither circumspect nor circuitous. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever met anyone more devastatingly straightforward – male or female.” “Well, it’s not by choice,” I said. I came to the end of the thread and tucked it neatly into the ball. “I was born that way.” “So was I,” he said, very softly.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

272. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

277. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

282. “Boldness in battle is nothing out of the way... but to face down fear in cold blood is rare in any man.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

284. “Maybe it was the result of gardening, that quiet sense of pleasure in touching growing things, the satisfaction of helping them thrive.”

— Diana Gabaldon

285. “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

286. “James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.”

— Diana Gabaldon

287. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

292. “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

293. “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

294. “He was generally aware that he had been blessed in her beauty; even in her usual homespun, knee-deep in mud from her garden, or stained and fierce with the blood of her calling, the curve of her bones spoke to his own marrow, and those whisky eyes could make him drunk with a glance. Besides, the mad collieshangie of her hair made him laugh.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

296. “I have a gift for you too,” I said suddenly to Jamie. He turned toward me and his hand slid, large and sure, over the plane of my still-flat stomach.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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