When God closes a door, he opens a window. Yeah. The problem was that this particular window opened off the tenth story, and he wasn’t so sure God supplied parachutes.
Deftly whipping a small tuning fork from his pocket, he struck it smartly against a pillar and held it next to Jamie’s left ear. Jamie rolled his eyes heavenward, but shrugged and obligingly sang a note. The little man jerked back as though he’d been shot.
I thought I could make out Jamie’s Highland screech, but that was likely imagination; they all sounded equally demented.
Through eons of living in a land so poor there was little to eat but oats, they had as usual converted necessity into a virtue, and insisted that they liked the stuff.
Scots have long memories, and they’re not the most forgiving of people.
My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too – enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser.
That’s for calling your father a fool. It may be true, but it’s disrespectful. Brian Fraser to teenage Jamie.
So remember it, lad. If your head thinks up mischief, your backside’s going to pay for it. Brian Fraser to young Jamie.
I gave you justice, it said, as I was taught it. And I gave you mercy, too, so far as I could. While I could not spare you pain and humiliation, I make you a gift of my own pains and humiliations, that yours might be easier to bear.
When you’re reading, you’re not where you are; you’re in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere.
If I die before I say ‘I love you’ it’s because I didn’t have the time.
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.
Well, I can’t remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three.
People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.
But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.
Your face is my heart.
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.
I didn’t want to tell the story of what makes two people come together, although that’s a theme of great power and universality. I wanted to find out what it takes for two people to stay together for fifty years – or more. I wanted to tell not the story of courtship, but the story of marriage.
He splayed a hand out over the photographs, trembling fingers not quite touching the shiny surface, and then he turned and leaned toward me, slowly, with the improbable grace of a tall tree falling. He buried his face in my shoulder and went very quietly and thoroughly to pieces.
As usual, the note occupied less than a page and included neither salutation nor closing, Uncle Hal’s opinion being that since the letter had a direction upon it, the intended recipient was obvious, the seal indicated plainly who had written it, and he did not waste his time in writing to fools.