He wasn’t going to pretend it hadn’t hurt to hear it, but he wouldn’t let himself be angry; that would help neither of them.
But you are not God, and there are limits to what you can expect of yourself.
There is an oath upon her,” he said to Arch, and I realized dimly that he was still speaking in Gaelic, though I understood him clearly. “She may not kill, save it is for mercy or her life. It is myself who kills for her.” “And I,” said a tall figure behind him, softly. Ian. Arch.
Feelings aren’t truth.
My father wasna always gentle, but he was usually fair,” Jamie said imperturbably. “He said the truth is the truth, and people should take responsibility for their own actions, which is right.
We’re going home, Sassenach. To Lallybroch.
Would you go down there, Roger?” she asked softly. “Jump overboard, dive in, go on down through that dark until your lungs were bursting, not knowing whether there are things with teeth and great heavy bodies waiting?
There is a great difference between those phenomena which are accepted on faith, and those which are proved by objective determination, though the cause of both may be equally ‘rational’ once known. And the chief difference is this: that people will treat with disdain such phenomena as are proved by the evidence of the senses, and commonly experienced – while they will defend to the death the reality of a phenomenon which they have neither seen nor experienced.
Well, I say it is the place of science only to observe,” he said. “To seek cause where it may be found, but to realize that there are many things in the world for which no cause shall be found; not because it does not exist, but because we know too little to find it. It is not the place of science to insist on explanation – but only to observe, in hopes that explanation will manifest itself.
Father to son. And with that thought, all the disconnected, fragmentary, scattered fancies in his brain dropped suddenly into a single, vivid image: Jamie Fraser, seen from the back, looking over the horses in the paddock at Helwater. And beside him, standing on a rail and clinging to a higher one, William, Earl of Ellesmere. The alert cock of their heads, the set of their shoulders, the wide stance – just the same.
Dead is dead, Major,” he said quietly. “It is not a romantic notion. And whatever my own feelings in the matter, my family would not prefer my death to my dishonor. While there is anyone alive with a claim upon my protection, my life is not my own.
Oh, yes,” I said. “My favorite was one I picked up from a Yank. Man named Williamson, from New York, I believe. He said it every time I changed his dressing.” “What was it?” “ ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,’ ” I said, and dropped the sugar.
There’s a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional.
I estimated the ambient humidity at roughly a thousand percent, but tipped a little of my sweetened coffee into the saucer and blew on it nonetheless.
But we do not fear silence, for often God speaks loudest in the quiet of our hearts.” And.
The ninth Earl of Ellesmere had his chin thrust out as far as it would go, but the defiant look in his eye was tempered with a certain doubt as he intercepted Jamie’s cold blue gaze. Jamie set the horse’s hoof down slowly, just as slowly stood up, and drawing himself to his full height of six feet four, put his hands on his hips, looked down at the Earl, three feet six, and said, very softly, “No.
Being in a state of grace is all very well, but I imagine even Joan of Arc had qualms when they lit the first brand.
Indeed,” Jamie said politely. “I believe that was the Crown’s notion in executing my grandsire on Tower Hill after the Rising. Verra effective, too; all my relations have been quite well behaved since.
I had realized many years before why “patients” are called that; it’s because a sick person is generally incapacitated, and thus obliged to put up with any amount of harassment and annoyance from persons who are not sick.
Jamie stood quite still, feeling his heart beat, watching. It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came.