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"Dialogue doesn't take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage."
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"Communication with God should not be a one-way traffic."

"There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things-her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation-I think of it as 'whole person conversation'-if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness."

"Confront somebody with an issue before it becomes a conflict. Confrontation is not all bad."

"We must understand that out of community and dialogue, the answers will arrive in their own time and way."

"And this is where I'll end, before I know what happens next."

"Borunia: Why do you want to be my friend?Samarga: I want to know if we can be friends."

"Armus: 'No need for interogation if you'd tell me this earlier.'Samarga: 'You wouldn't buy it if I gave it away without squeal."
Explore more quotes by Diana Gabaldon

"Brave' covers everything from complete insanity and bloody disregard of other people's lives - generals tend to go in for that sort - to drunkenness, foolhardiness, and outright idiocy - to the sort of thing that will make a man sweat and tremble and throw up . . . and go and do what he thinks he has to do anyway."

"One of the general patterns of good (i.e., striking and memorable) writing is the effect of repetition. If you use a certain element-a plot device, an image, a noticeable phrase-once, readers may or may not notice it consciously, but it doesn't disturb the flow of their reading. If you use that element twice, they won't notice it consciously-but they will notice it subconsciously, and it will add to the resonance of the writing or to their sense of depth and involvement (and if it's a plot device, it will heighten the dramatic tension). But if you use that element three times, everybody will notice it the third time you do it."

"Jamie's viewpoint is expressed almost entirely in metaphor: If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle. He's using physical language, but he isn't talking about the physical details of the situation. Claire alludes to her emotion and shows it by her actions, but Jamie is thinking directly in pure emotions."

"I put back my head, looking up at the deep black sky swimming with hot stars. If you knew they were really balls of flaming gas, you could imagine them as Van Gogh saw them, without difficulty . . . and looking into that illuminated void, you understood why people have always looked up into the sky when talking to God. You need to feel the immensity of something very much bigger than yourself, and there it is - immeasurably vast, and always near at hand. Covering you."

"For the moment, everything had disappeared: the church, the battle, the screams and shouts and the rumble of limber wheels along the rutted road through Freehold. There wasn't anything but her and him, and he opened his eyes to look on her face, to fix it in his mind forever."

"The law's a necessary evil--we canna be doing without it--but do ye not think it a poor substitute for conscience?"

"Oh, aye, Sassenach. I am your master . . . and you're mine. Seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own."

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

"When I asked my da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time came, I'd have no doubt. And I didn't. When I woke in the dark under that tree on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to death, I said to myself 'Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks like, and for all she weights as much as a good draft horse, this is the woman."
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