Diana Gabaldon Quotes (85 Quotes)

Hodie mihi cras tibi. Sic transit gloria mundi.

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.

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.

There was a feeling, not sudden, but complete, as though I had been given a small object to hold unseen in my hands. Precious as opal, smooth as jade, weighty as a river stone, more fragile than a bird's egg. Infinitely still, live as the root of Creation. Not a gift, but a trust. Fiercely to cherish, softly to guard. The words spoke themselves and disappeared into the groined shadows of the roof.

It has always been forever, for me, Sassenach

I do know it, my own. Let me tell ye in your sleep how much I love you. For there's no so much I can be saying to ye while ye wake, but the same poor words, again and again. While ye sleep in my arms, I can say things to ye that would be daft and silly waking, and your dreams will know the truth of them. Go back to sleep, mo duinne.

You are mine, always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I willna let ye go

I can bear pain myself, he said softly, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.

There was a smell about the place, which I imagined as the smell of misery and fear, though I supposed it was no more than the niff of ancient squalor and an absence of drains.

It isn't necessarily easier if you know what it is you're meant to do-- but at least you don't waste time in questioning or doubting. If you're honest--well, that isn't necessarily easier, either. Though I suppose if you're honest with yourself and know what you are, at least you're less likely to feel that you've wasted your life, doing the wrong thing.

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.

You're mine, damn ye, Claire Fraser! Mine, and I wilna share ye, with a man or a memory, or anything whatever, so long as both shall live.

I gave you justice, it said, as I was taught it. And I gave you mercy , too, so far as I could. While I could not spare you pain and humiliation, I make you a gift of my own pains and humiliations, that yours might be easier to bear.

There were moments, of course. Those small spaces in time, too soon gone, when everything seems to stand still, and existence is balanced on a perfect point, like the moment of change between the dark and the light, and when both and neither surround you.

It wasn't a thing I had consciously missed, but having it now reminded me of the joy of it; that drowsy intimacy in which a man's body is accessible to you as your own, the strange shapes and textures of it like a sudden extension of your own limbs.

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.

An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time

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.

We have nothing now between us, save - respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies.

The most irritating thing about cliches, I decided, was how frequently they were true.

All I want, is for you to love me. Not because of what I can do or what I look like, or because I love you - just because I am.

I wasn't used to living crowded cheek by jowl with numbers of other people, as was customary here. People ate, slept, and frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by smoky peat fires. The only thing they didn't do together was bathe - largely because they didn't bathe.

This is our time. Until that time stops - for one of us, for both - it is our time. Now. Will you waste it, because you are afraid?

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

I have lived through war, and lost much. I know what's worth the fight, and what is not. Honor and courage are matters of the bone, and what a man will kill for, he will sometimes die for, too. And that, O kinsman, is why a woman has broad hips; that bony basin will harbor a man and his child alike. A man's life springs from his woman's bones, and in her blood is his honor christened. For the sake of love alone, I would walk through fire again.

He reached forward then took me in his arms, held me close for a moment, the breath of snow and ashes cold around us. Then he kissed me, released me, and I took a deep breath of cold air, harsh with the scent of burning.

If it was a sin for you to choose me . . . then I would go to the Devil himself and bless him for tempting ye to it.

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.

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

If I'd known I should meet a damn bear, Jamie said, grunting as he lifted another stone into place, I would have taken another path.

I have two brain cells left, and one of them is busy reminding me to buy toilet paper.

Claire travels in time. And while she and Jamie do fall in love, their story is not so much the stuff of sighs and moans (well, not just that anyway) as it is a grand adventure written on a canvas that probes the heart, weighs the soul and measures the human spirit across 10 generations. These are genre-bending novels, and that's just one of many reasons that people read them. Historical romance is not what I write, ... I've always called them historical fantasias.

All romance novels are courtship stories, and I'm not really interested in that,

Some people are just mad about the historical aspects they feel as though they're living in a different time or they're learning something,

Nobody had ever told me how to do these things, ... I didn't want anyone giving me advice until I had it all figured out on my own.