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...but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And we'll get mad at it, and we'll rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves. We'll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont Sea, and it won't ever be right, when there are the proper names..."

"Everywhere I look I see things that were used. They were touched and handled for centuries. Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names...

"He raised hia head, and I felt the sudden chill on my hand, where the ancient scar showed white as bone. A letter 'J', cut in the skin, his mark on me.
He laid his hand against my face, and I pressed it there with my own, as though I could feel the faded "C" he bore on his own palm, against the cold skinof my cheek. Neither of us spoke, but the pledge was made, as we had made it once before..."

"The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking."

"I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around –nobody big, I mean –except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff –I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them."

"...I started talking, sort of out loud, to Allie. [...] one day Bobby and I were going to take our lunches and all, and our BB guns [...] Allie heard us talking about it, and he wanted to go, and I wouldn't let him. I told him he was a child. So once in a while, when I get very depressed, I keep saying to him, 'Okay. Go home and get your bike and meet me in front of Bobby's house. Hurry up.'"

"The C sharp minor waltz, same opus [op. 64], is the most poetic of all. The veiled melancholy of the first theme has seldom been excelled by the composer. It is a fascinating lyric sorrow [...] A space of clear skies, warmer, more consoling winds are in the D flat interlude; but the spirit of unrest soon returns. The elegiac note is unmistakable in this veritable soul dance."

"Just because he did not label his works with any but general titles, Ballades, Studies, Preludes, Scherzi, and the like, his music sounds all the better; the listener is not pinned down to any precise mood, the music being allowed to work its particular charm without the aid of literary crutches for unimaginative minds."

'Most people have hardly any smile at all, or a loust one.'

'After I shut the door and started back to the living room, he yelled something at me, but I couldn't exactly hear him. I'm pretty sure he yelled "Good luck!" at me. I hope not. I hope the hell not. I'd never yell "Good luck!" at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it.'

《For a moment, I had a vision of the MacKenzie clan badge –a 'burning mountain'– and realized suddenly what it was. Not a volcano, as I had thought. No, it was the image of a Gathering like this one, the fires of families burning in the dark, a signal to all that the clan was present –and together. And for the first time, I understood the motto that went with the image: Luceo non uro; I shine, not burn.》

《It was Frank's favourite quotation, one he always used to soothe Brianna or me when we worried over things: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

The air in the room was live; a light breeze stirred the curtains, and coolness touched my cheek.

"Do you know?" I whispered, soundless. "Do you know she has a son?"

There was no answer, but peace came gradually over me in the quiet of the night...》

《Two miracles I had been given, carried beneath my heart, born of my body, held in my arms, separated from me and part of me forever. I knew much too well that neither death nor time nor distance ever altered such a bond –because I had been altered by it, once and forever changed by that mysterious connection.》

《His mother had died long ago [...] he had mostly replaced his presence with static pictures, frozen images in his mind. But she had said "Phew!" to him when he came in mucky, and wrinkled up her long nose in just that way –it had come back with a flash when he saw Brianna do it.

What a mystery blood was –how did a tiny gesture, a tone of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of life?》

《"She doesn't mind being alone."He glanced at her, wanting badly to know what made her say so. What had Claire's life been in their years apart to give her that knowledge? It was so; 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. But she had lived daily with a husband; how had she drunk deep enough of loneliness to know?》

《...and then a deep, painful red washed up his throat and into his face, sudden as a brushfire, matching her own vivid colour.
She felt a deep flash of joy at the sight, a rush through her midsection that echoed that blaze of blood, recognition of their fair-skinned kinship. Did it trouble him to blush so strongly? [...] Had he schooled his face to immobility, as she had learned to do, to mask that telltale surge?》

《Yeah, he'd been lonely. Knew bloody well what it felt like to have no one in the world who belonged to you, or you to them. But surely that was one reason why they had reached out to each other –he and Brianna.

[...] It was a leap of faith –to throw one's heart across a gulf, and trust another to catch it. His own was still in flight across the void, with no certainty of landing. But still in flight.》

《Two hundred years from now, she had –I will? she thought wildly–stood in front of this portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, furiously denying the truth that it showed.
Ellen MacKenzie looked out at her now as she had then [...] It wasn't a mirror image, by any means; Ellen's forehead was high, narrower than Brianna's [...] but the resemblance was there, and pronounced enough to be startling.》

《" 'Whither thou goest,' " I said, " 'I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.' " Be it Scottish hill or southern forest. "You do what you have to; I'll be there." 》

«They were my tools, my channel of touch, mingling the delicacy and strength by which I healed. They had a certain beauty [...] the beauty of strength and competence.
It was the same hand now [...] yet it lay in a hand so much larger and rougher that it seemed small, and fragile by comparison. [...] I felt at once horribly vulnerable and yet completely safe. But then –I had always felt that way with Jamie Fraser.»

«Might there be common ground for them, a historian and an engineer? He facing backwards to the mysteries of the past, she to the future and its dazzling gleam?
Then the room relaxed in cheers and babbling, and she turned in his arms to kiss him hard and cling to him, and he thought perhaps it didn't matter that they faced in opposite directions –so long as they faced each other.»

«He'd been so tender, and so kind afterward, treating her like a freshly bereaved –which she was. But such a strange bereavement! Her mother gone for good, but certainly –she hoped– not dead. And yet it was in some ways just as it had been when her father died; like believing in a blessed afterlife, ardently hoping that your loved one was safe and happy –and being forced to suffer the pangs of loss and loneliness...»

«"A Shasunnaich na galladh, 's olc thig e dhuibh fanaid air bàs gasgaich. Gun toireadh an diabhul flein leis anns a bhàs sibh, direach do Fhirinn!" Wicked Sassenach dogs, eaters of dead flesh! Ill does it become you to laugh and rejoice at the death of a gallant man! May the devil himself seize upon you in the hour of your death and take you straight to hell!»

«"America," I said softly. "The New World." The pulse beneath my fingers had quickened, echoing my own. A new world. Refuge. Freedom.
[...] "In that case, ma'am," he said, "my name is Jamie Fraser." He looked at me, eyes blue and brilliant as the sky behind him, and his heart beat strong in the palm of my hand.
"And this is Claire," he said. "My wife."»

«It's not everyone can go through the stones, is it? Why us? Some people can leave their bodies and travel miles away. [...] Some people have stigmata ye can see and touch –I've seen one. But not everybody. Only certain people. If everyone can do it, it's science. If only a few can, then it's witchcraft, or superstition, or whatever you like to call it. But it's real. We're real, Claire –you and me. And special.»

«'He saw me. And he smiled.' And then the older man's hand had touched his cheek briefly. 'Dinna be afraid, a bhalaich,' Murtagh had said, using the endearment for a small, beloved boy. 'It doesna hurt a bit to die.'»

«All the names I've called you through the years –my chick, my pumpkin, precious dove, darling, sweetheart, dinky, smudge...I know why the Jews and Muslims have nine hundred names for God; one small word is not enough for love.»

«For so many years, for so long, I have been so many things, so many different men. I was 'Uncle' to Jenny's children, and 'Brother' to her and Ian. 'Milord' to Fergus, and 'Sir' to my tenants. 'Mac Dubh' to the men of Ardsmuir and 'MacKenzie' to the other servants at Helwater. 'Malcom the printer', then, and 'Jamie Roy' at the docks. But here, here in the dark, with you...I have no name.»