So long as my body lives, and yours -- we are one flesh," he whispered, "And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours. Claire -- I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you.

For I had come back, and I dreamed once more in the cool air of the Highlands. And the voice of my dream still echoed through ears and heart, repeated with the sound of Brianna's sleeping breath. "You are mine," it had said. "Mine. And I will not let you go.

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.

He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources.

......what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of myself, only what I will become.

Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman's part to bid them to stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are-or for not coming back.

And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours, Claire? I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you." The wind stirred the leaves of the chestnut trees nearby, and the scents of late summer rose up rich around us; pine and grass and strawberries, sun-warmed stone and cool water, and the sharp, musky smell of his body next to mine. "Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed." "That's the first law of thermodynamics," I said, wiping my nose. "No," he said. "That's faith.