Jamie, who had insisted on walking most of the way to spare the horse, was a disreputable sight indeed, hose stained to the knees with reddish dust, spare shirt torn by brambles and a week’s growth of...
Jamie was a much a sponge as his grandson, I reflected, watching him rootle about, completely naked and totally unconcerned about it. He took in everything, and seemed able to deal with whatever came...
Jamie has held my life in his hands for a good many years now, he answered softly. I will trust him with William’s. And what if Willie remembers a groom named MacKenzie better than you think? Or happe...
James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, I said, spacing the words, formally, the way Jamie had spoken them to me when he first told me his full name on the day of our wedding.
JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER,’ she read aloud. Yes, I know him. Her hand dropped lower, brushing back the grass that grew thickly about the stone, obscuring the line of smaller letters at...
I’ve thought that perhaps that’s why women are so often sad, once the child’s born, she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. Ye think of them while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as...
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?
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.
It’s strange, he said, when he was alive, I didna pay him much heed. But once he was dead, the things he’d told me had a good deal more influence.
It wasn’t the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, after all; it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge might be a poisoned gift—but it was still a gift, and few people woul...
It wasn’t stubbornness, nor even loyalty, that had made Willie insist on staying at the Ridge. It was love of John Grey, and fear of his loss. And it was the same love that made the boy weep in the ni...
It was what you did when someone died; turned toward God and at least acknowledge the fact.
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...
It was in kindness that the thought came to me now, whether it was truly spoken, or only called forth from my exhausted memory for what comfort the words might hold. Everyone makes choices, and no one...
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. I could see, perhaps, how one could draw back a little, seek som...
It hadn't occurred to him that if she had little else, it would be that much more important to Joan Findlay to cling to her one valuable possession-her pride.
Ifs hover in the air above your head all the time when you’re doing surgery, like a cloud of gnats. For the most part, though, they keep a respectful distance, only buzzing dimly in the background. Do...
If, I said through my teeth, you ever raise a hand to me again, James Fraser, I’ll cut out your heart and fry it for breakfast!
If you’ll not let me be spiritual about it, you’ll have to put up wi’ my baser nature. I’m going to be a beast. He bit my neck. Do ye want me to be a horse, a bear, or a dog?
If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle.