While the Lord might insist that vengeance was His, no male Highlander of my acquaintance had ever thought it right that the Lord should be left to handle such things without assistance.

I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line.

No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.

I had kissed my share of men, particularly during the war years, when flirtation and instant romance were the light-minded companions of death and uncertainty. Jamie, thought, was something different. His extreme gentleness was in no way tentative; rather it was a promise of power known and held in leash; a challenge and a provocation the more remarkable for its lack of demand. I am yours, it said. And if you will have me, then.

This is our time. Until that time stops - for one of us, for both – it is our time. Now. Will you waste it, because you are afraid?

Not for the first time, I reflected that intimacy and romance are not synonymous.

I wouldna cross the road to see a scrawny woman if she was stark naked and dripping wet. ~Jamie Fraser