Top 500 Diana Gabaldon Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Diana Gabaldon

352. “I felt at once horribly vulnerable and yet completely safe.”

— Diana Gabaldon

353. “Damn ye, woman! Will ye never do as you’re told?” “Probably not,” I said meekly.”

— Diana Gabaldon

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

359. “For a moment, I saw him as he had looked the morning I married him. Duine uasal was what he looked, a man of worth. But the bold face above the lace was the same, older now, but wiser with it – yet the tilt of his shining head and the set of the wide, firm mouth, the slanted clear cat-eyes that looked into my own, were just the same. Here was a man who had always known his worth.”

— Diana Gabaldon

360. “Was a struggle to choose one’s own destiny less worthwhile than the necessity to stop a great evil?”

— Diana Gabaldon

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

— Diana Gabaldon

362. “Ye ken that, don’t ye? That they can only be what they are because you and I are what we are?”

— Diana Gabaldon

363. “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

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

— Diana Gabaldon

365. “He said the truth is the truth, and people should take responsibility for their own actions, which is right.”

— Diana Gabaldon

366. “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

367. “Twilight was coming on, and so was a storm. In the eerie light beneath the clouds, even the thoroughly modern houses along the road looked as ancient and as sinister as the weathered Pictish stone that stood a hundred feet away, guarding the crossroads it had marked for a thousand years. It seemed a good night to be inside with the shutters fastened.”

— Diana Gabaldon

368. “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

369. “I kept havin’ terrible lewd dreams about ye, all the night long,” he explained, twitching his breeks into better adjustment. “Every time I rolled over, I’d lie on my cock and wake up. It was awful.” I burst out laughing, and he affected to look injured, though I could see reluctant amusement behind it. “Well, you can laugh, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye havena got one to trouble ye.” “Yes, and a great relief it is, too,” I assured him.”

— Diana Gabaldon

370. “But the years between now and then had been hard ones – and compassion was a soft emotion, easily eroded by circumstance.”

— Diana Gabaldon

371. “Cows?” he asked, “Was it really cows, or was I dreaming?”

— Diana Gabaldon

372. “Mm. You’d forgotten how to say anything except ‘I love you,’ but you said that a lot.”

— Diana Gabaldon

373. “Hello,” I said softly, one hand over the butterfly wings that beat inside me.”

— Diana Gabaldon

374. “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

375. “How was yer first time, Jamie? Did ye bleed?” shouted Rupert.”

— Diana Gabaldon

376. “I had never deflowered anyone before.”

— Diana Gabaldon

377. “I could know ye all my life, I think, and always love you.”

— Diana Gabaldon

378. “I’ve spent more than twenty years looking for answers, Roger, and I can tell you only one thing: There aren’t any answers, only choices. I’ve made a number of them myself, and no one can tell me whether they were right or wrong.”

— Diana Gabaldon

379. “Any piece of good music is in essence a love song.”

— Diana Gabaldon

380. “Often people who are very ill, but are near their birthday, seem to wait until it’s passed before dying. I.”

— Diana Gabaldon

381. “His heart was beating very erratically; perhaps it would conveniently stop. He waited for a moment to allow it to do this if it liked, but it went on cheerfully thumping away.”

— Diana Gabaldon

382. “Roger lay in the dust of the road, bruised, filthy, and starving, with a woman trembling and weeping against his chest, now and then giving him a small thump with her fist. He had never felt happier in his life.”

— Diana Gabaldon

383. “He came through the front door just as I barreled into the hallway, and grabbed me round the waist, kissing me with sun-dusty enthusiasm and sandpaper whiskers.”

— Diana Gabaldon

384. “I didna say I wanted an apology, did I? If I recall aright, what I said was ‘Bite me again.”

— Diana Gabaldon

385. “Well, of course he does, Sassenach,” Jamie said, reaching for another slice of toast. “He left her his dog.”

— Diana Gabaldon

386. “Yes, but – ” I began. “So” – he said authoritatively, holding up a finger to hush me – “if you have been deprived of your earlier life, perhaps it is only that God has seen fit to bless you with another, that may be richer and fuller.”

— Diana Gabaldon

387. “The ninth Earl of Ellesmere had his chin thrust out as far as it would go, but the defiant look in his eye was tempered with a certain doubt as he intercepted Jamie’s cold blue gaze. Jamie set the horse’s hoof down slowly, just as slowly stood up, and drawing himself to his full height of six feet four, put his hands on his hips, looked down at the Earl, three feet six, and said, very softly, “No.”

— Diana Gabaldon

388. “I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eighteenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men.”

— Diana Gabaldon

389. “My first coherent thought was, “It’s raining. This must be Scotland.”

— Diana Gabaldon

390. “Some were in Gaelic and some in English, used apparently according to which language best fitted the rhythm of the words, for all of them had a beauty to the speaking, beyond the content of the tale itself.”

— Diana Gabaldon

391. “I, ah, I wasn’t expecting – ” I said idiotically. Brianna gave me a grin to match her father’s, eyes bright as stars and damp with happiness. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” “What?” said Jamie blankly.”

— Diana Gabaldon

392. “I stood in front of him in nothing but my shoes and gartered rose-silk stockings.”

— Diana Gabaldon

393. “I’m not entirely sure the Scots realize they lost that one,” I interrupted, sitting up and trying to subdue my hair. “I distinctly heard the barman at that pub last night refer to us as Sassenachs.” “Well, why not?” said Frank equably. “It only means ‘Englishman,’ after all, or at worst, ‘outlander,’ and we’re all of that.”

— Diana Gabaldon

394. “I felt simultaneously wonderful and wretched, and didn’t know from moment to moment which feeling was uppermost.”

— Diana Gabaldon

395. “Through eons of living in a land so poor there was little to eat but oats, they had as usual converted necessity into a virtue, and insisted that they liked the stuff.”

— Diana Gabaldon

396. “Do not forget to entertain strangers,” Buck said in the same language, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

— Diana Gabaldon

397. “Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.”

— Diana Gabaldon

398. “Dr. Stern told me that the wilderness of Carolina is alive wi’ fierce creatures – bears and wildcats and wicked panthers – and a great foul thing the Indians call a skunk!”

— Diana Gabaldon

399. “My love,” he whispered. “Oh, my love. I do want ye so.”

— Diana Gabaldon

400. “Jealousy had nothing to do with logic.”

— Diana Gabaldon