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.
Sometimes our best action result in things that are most regrettable.
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.
She sounded as though love were an unfortunate but unavoidable condition.
No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.
It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.
I don’t plot the books out ahead of time, I don’t plan them. I don’t begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don’t work with an outline and I don’t work in a straight line.
I work late at night. I’m awake and nobody bothers me. It’s quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.
That’s what marriage is good for; it makes a sacrament out of things ye’d otherwise have to confess. Jamie Fraser.