A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Outlander, #6)

by Diana Gabaldon

Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There’s the always preexisting, and having no end. There’s the notion of being all powerful—because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil.

“They do say that God protects fools—but I think even the Almighty will lose patience now and then.”

Hodie mihi cras tibi—sic transit gloria mundi. My turn today—yours tomorrow. Thus passes the glory of the world.

The mountains had their own time, and a wise man did not try to hurry them.

Real danger had its own taste,

No man is really at his best with someone else’s hand up his arse.

that a Man’s sense of Morality tends to decrease as his Power increases,

If the evils of the past canna hinder us—neither then shall any fears of the future. We must just put things behind us and get on.

“Highlanders make the truest friends—if only because they make the worst enemies.”

Come to think, perhaps being nearly killed wasn’t always a misfortune—so long as you didn’t actually die of it.

To fight on the winning side was one thing; to survive, quite another.

There is a great deal of satisfaction in wresting weeds out of the earth. Backbreaking and endless as the chore may be, there is a tiny but unassailable sense of triumph in it, feeling the soil give suddenly, yielding the stubborn root, and the foe lying defeated in your hand.

“I have yearned always,” he said softly, “for love given and returned; have spent my life in the attempt to give my love to those who were not worthy of it. Allow me this: to give my life for the sake of one who is.”