Still, when had the right to live as one wished ever been considered trivial? Was a struggle to choose one’s own destiny less worthwhile than the necessity to stop a great evil?
I’ve yet to see the auld woman believes in witches, nor the young one, neither. It’s men think there must be ill-wishes and magic in women, when it’s only the natural way of the creatures.
The phrase “Blessed are those who have not seen but have believed” floated through his head. It was maybe not the believing that was the blessing; it was the not having to look. Seeing, sometimes, was bloody awful.
I found the rooted silence, rushing stream, and rustling leaves balm to the spirit.
Doom, or save. That I cannot do. For I have no power beyond that of knowledge, no ability to bend others to my will, no way to stop them doing what they will. There is only me.
Roger lay in the dust of the road, bruised, filthy, and starving, with a woman trembling and weeping against his chest, now and then giving him a small thump with her fist. He had never felt happier in his life.
Well, of course he does, Sassenach,” Jamie said, reaching for another slice of toast. “He left her his dog.
God kens well enough that boys need to be smacked, or he’d no fill them sae full o’ the de’il.
When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.
It was a hot summer – there wasn’t any other kind in Boston.
What Jack Randall had done to him had sunk into his soul as surely as the flails of the lash had sunk in his back, and had left scars every bit as permanent. I.
Come to me. Cover me. Shelter me, a bhean, heal me. Burn with me, as I burn for you.
I felt deeply betrayed that the man I depended on as friend, protector, and lover intended to do such a thing to me. And my sense of self-preservation was quietly terrified at the thought of submitting myself to the mercies of someone who handled a fifteen-pound claymore as though it were a flywhisk.
You alone, hold all my heart, whole in your hands. And you know that.
Your husband should tan ye, woman,” said an austere voice from the blackness under a tree. “St. Paul says ‘Let a woman be silent, and – ’ ” “You can mind your own bloody business,” I snarled, sweat dripping behind my ears, “and so can St. Paul.
But when I lay wi’ Emily – from the first time. I knew. Kent who I was again.” He looked up at her then, eyes dark and shadowed by loss. “My soul didna wander while I slept – when I slept wi’ her.
I finished grating a root and dropped the stub into a jar on the desk. Bloodroot is aptly named; the scientific name is Sanguinaria, and the juice is red, acrid, and sticky. The bowl in my lap was full of oozy, moist shavings, and my hands looked as though I had been disemboweling small animals.
Often the best tool is the most dangerous. One doesn’t hesitate to use it on that account; one merely makes sure to take adequate precautions.
The dog would run a few steps toward the house, circle once or twice as though unable to decide what to do next, then run back into the wood, turn, and run again toward the house, all the while whining with agitation, tail low and wavering. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. “Bloody Timmy’s in the well!” I.
He experienced that peculiar crawling of the flesh that attends any child’s sudden realization that a parent must not only have engaged at some comfortably primeval date in the theoretical carnal act that resulted in his own existence – but was capable of doing it again in the all-too-physical present.