"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."

"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."

"Nay, he needs a woman, not a girl. And Laoghaire will be a girl when she's fifty."

"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."