Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.”

— Diana Gabaldon

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

312. “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

313. “And it was, as Dougal explained, convenient to the pillory, a homely wooden contraption that stood on a small stone plinth in the center of the square, adjacent to the wooden stake used – with thrifty economy of purpose – as whipping post, maypole, flagstaff and horse tether, depending upon requirements.”

— Diana Gabaldon

314. “I’m not sure that religion was constructed with time travelers in mind.” Buck’s brows rose at that. “Constructed?” he echoed, surprised. “Who builds God?”

— Diana Gabaldon

315. “I glanced upward once, to see Brianna glowing, still smiling from ear to ear. Jamie was behind her, also smiling, his cheeks wet with tears. He said something to her in husky Gaelic, and brushing the hair away from her neck, leaned forward and kissed her gently, just behind the ear.”

— Diana Gabaldon

316. “Does he – is he one who knows what he is, do you think?” Claire’s hands stilled, the clanking pestle falling silent. “Oh, yes,” she said. “He knows.” “A laird? Is that what you’d call it?” Her mother hesitated, thinking. “No,” she said at last. She took up the pestle and began to grind again. The fragrance of dried marjoram filled the room like incense. “He’s a man,” she said, “and that’s no small thing to be.”

— Diana Gabaldon

317. “He came toward us, looking worried. As the birth grew closer, we had both been edgy; Frank irritable and myself terrified, having no idea what might happen between us, with the appearance of Jamie Fraser’s child. But when the nurse had taken Brianna from her bassinet and handed her to Frank, with the words “Here’s Daddy’s little girl,” his face had grown blank, and then – looking down at the tiny face, perfect as a rosebud – gone soft with wonder. Within a week, he had been hers, body and soul.”

— Diana Gabaldon

318. “In that case, maybe we shouldn’t be disturbing you,” said a soft American voice. “Oh, I forgot,” said Claire, half-turning to the girl who had stood out of sight in the corner of the porch. “Roger Wakefield – my daughter, Brianna.”

— Diana Gabaldon

319. “He went on loving her,” she whispered, as much to herself as to anyone else. “He didn’t forget her.” “Of course he didna forget her.” She opened her eyes to see Ian’s long face and kind brown eyes six inches away. A broad work-worn hand rested on hers, warm and hard, a hand even larger than her own. “Neither did we,” he said.”

— Diana Gabaldon

320. “An unaccustomed weed of jealousy sprang up in Jamie’s heart, stinging like nettles. He stamped firmly on it; he was fortunate indeed to know that his son enjoyed a loving relationship with his stepfather. There, that was the weed stamped out. The stamping, though, seemed to have left a small bruised spot on his heart; he could feel it when he breathed.”

— Diana Gabaldon

321. “Intimacy and romance are not synonymous.”

— Diana Gabaldon

322. “You can’t make a horse do anything. You see what he’s going to do and then you tell him to do that, and he thinks it’s your idea, so next time you tell him something, he’s more likely to do what you tell him.”

— Diana Gabaldon

323. “Well, the Church does teach that self-abuse is a sin, but my father said he thought that if it came to a choice between abusin’ yourself or some poor woman, a decent man might choose to make the sacrifice.”

— Diana Gabaldon

324. “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

325. “But then, I didn’t think I’d tell them you were here.” “What makes you think they don’t know?” I asked, beginning to feel rather hollow, despite my earlier resolve to brazen it out. I cast a quick glance at the window, but.”

— Diana Gabaldon

326. “He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources.”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

328. “Even when I’ve just left ye, I want you so much my chest feels tight and my fingers ache with wanting to touch ye again.”

— Diana Gabaldon

329. “My God, he thought, I’m going to die before I’ve been born.”

— Diana Gabaldon

330. “A man should pay tribute to your body,” he said softly... “For you are beautiful, and that is your right.”

— Diana Gabaldon

331. “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

332. “Marketing with a small baby was more like a ninety-minute expedition into Darkest Borneo, requiring massive amounts of equipment and tremendous expenditures of energy.”

— Diana Gabaldon

333. “I listen,” she said simply. “To what folk say – and what they don’t.”

— Diana Gabaldon

334. “The pressure of events was increasing, day by day, and he could feel responsibility wrapped like a strangling vine about his spinal cord, reaching eager fingers into the base of his skull.”

— Diana Gabaldon

335. “It is for this reason that a scientist constructs hypotheses – suggestions for the cause of an observation. But a hypothesis must never be confused with an explanation – with proof.”

— Diana Gabaldon

336. “The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination. Rain.”

— Diana Gabaldon

337. “Until we two be burned to ashes.”

— Diana Gabaldon

338. “He was right, of course. Bloody man, he was almost always right.”

— Diana Gabaldon

339. “If ye were no longer there – or somewhere – ” he said very softly, “then the sun would no longer come up or go down.” He lifted my hand and kissed it, very gently. He laid it, closed around my ring, upon my chest, rose, and left.”

— Diana Gabaldon

340. “Money is a good bridle, but a weak rein.”

— Diana Gabaldon

341. “I had never deflowered anyone before.”

— Diana Gabaldon

342. “No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.”

— Diana Gabaldon

343. “When I asked my da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time came, I’d have no doubt. And I didn’t. When I woke in the dark under that tree on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to death, I said to myself ‘Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks like, and for all she weights as much as a good draft horse, this is the woman.”

— Diana Gabaldon

344. “It wasn’t the risk,” I said, flicking my toes at a big black-and-white splotched carp. “Or not entirely. It was – well, it was partly fear, but mostly it was that I – I couldn’t leave Jamie.” I shrugged helplessly. “I – simply couldn’t.”

— Diana Gabaldon

345. “Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days smacks of masochism.”

— Diana Gabaldon

346. “I understood very well just then, why it is that men measure time. They wish to fix a moment, in the vain hope that doing so will keep it from departing.”

— Diana Gabaldon

347. “Your aunt’s a handsome woman, Fraser, but she could freeze the ballocks off the King o’ Japan, and she wanted to.”

— Diana Gabaldon

348. “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

349. “I’ll leave it to you, Sassenach,” he said dryly, “to imagine what it feels like to arrive unexpectedly in the midst of a brothel, in possession of a verra large sausage.”

— Diana Gabaldon

350. “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