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"He has cat blood, I reflected sourly, no doubt that was how he managed to sneak up on me in the darkness."
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Exlpore more Observation quotes
"Good God. Men everywhere."
"She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there. Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace."
"Right now, it's hard to imagine that it is raining anywhere in the world."
"The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place."
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."
"I'm almost afraid to tell you. Let's put it this way: clean toilets are the least of your problems in this country."
"You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn't mean anything."
"It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time."
"He has cat blood, I reflected sourly, no doubt that was how he managed to sneak up on me in the darkness."
Explore more quotes by Diana Gabaldon
"For a different woman, a different relationship, a different situation, gentleness might have been the proper, the only approach-but not for this woman, in these circumstances. The only thing that will cleanse Claire (and reassure her: look at what she says at the end of it. She feels safe again, having felt the power and violence in him) is violence. And-the most important point here-Jamie pays attention to what she wants, rather than proceeding with his own notion of how it should be, even though it's a sensible notion and the one most people would have."
"Soldiers manage by dividing themselves. They're one man in the killing, another at home, and the man that dandles his bairn on his knee has nothing to do wi' the man who crushed his enemy's throat with his boot, so he tells himself, sometimes successfully."
"Just as an effective advertisement or page layout includes a lot of white space, a powerful scene requires immense restraint. Show things as simply as possible."
"Time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is-in the blink of an eye, a mother can see the child again as they were when they were born, when they learned how to walk, as they were at any age-at any time, even when the child is fully grown or a parent themselves."
"Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers."
"It's the anonymity of the war that makes the killing possible. When the nameless dead are named again on tombstone and on cenotaph, then they regain the identity they lost as soldiers, and take their place in grief and memory, the ghosts of sons and lovers."
"No matter how ugly the manner in which a man dies, it's only the presence of a suffering human soul that is horrifying, once gone, what is left is only an object."
"One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough."
"Its appearance was greeted with cries of rapture, and following a brief struggle over possesion of the volume, William rescued it before it should be torn to pieces, but allowed himself to be induced to read some of the passages aloud, his dramatic rendering being greeted by wolflike howls of enthusiasim and hails of live pits."
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