While ye sleep in my arms, I can say things to ye that would be daft and silly waking, and your dreams will know the truth of them.

There comes a turning point in intense physical struggle where one abandons oneself to a profligate usage of strength and bodily resource, ignoring the costs until the struggle is over. Women find this point in childbirth; men in battle.

All I want, is for you to love me. Not because of what I can do or what I look like, or because I love you - just because I am.

Sometimes,' he whispered at last, 'sometimes, I dream I am singing, and I wake from it with my throat aching.' He couldn't see her face, or the tears that prickled at the corners of her eyes. 'What do you sing?' she whispered back. She heard the shush of the linen pillow as he shook his head. 'No song I've ever heard, or know,' he said softly. 'But I know I'm singing it for you.

Oh, Claire, ye do break my heart wi' loving you.

Perhaps it was only that the sense of reaching out to something larger than yourself gives you some feeling that there is something larger - and there really has to be, because plainly you aren't sufficient to the situation.

That's what marriage is good for; it makes a sacrament out of things ye'd otherwise have to confess. Jamie Fraser