Voyager (Outlander, #3)

by Diana Gabaldon

“It was not Monsieur Arouet, but a colleague of his—a lady novelist—who remarked to me once that writing novels was a cannibal’s art, in which one often mixed small portions of one’s friends and one’s enemies together, seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a savory concoction.”

“Let me speak plainly, Mr. Fraser. I do you the honor of assuming you to be a sensible man.” “I am deeply sensible of the honor, Major, I do assure you.”

“I think perhaps the greatest burden lies in caring for those we cannot help.” “Not in having no one for whom to care?” Fraser paused before answering; he might have been weighing the position of the pieces on the table. “That is emptiness,” he said at last, softly. “But no great burden.”

“A man that doesna shit himself with a pistol held to his head, Major, has either no bowels, or no brains.”

“Aconite. And what might that be, I wonder?” “Well, it’s poison, for one thing,” I said. Mr. Haugh’s mouth dropped open momentarily. “It’s a medicine, too,” I assured him. “But you have to be careful in the use of it. Externally, it’s good for rheumatism, but a very tiny amount taken by mouth will lower the rate of the pulse. Good for some kinds of heart trouble.”

“He created a desert and called it peace.”

All the names I’ve called you through the years—my chick, my pumpkin, precious dove, darling, sweetheart, dinky, smudge … I know why the Jews and Muslims have nine hundred names for God; one small word is not enough for love.

“Your Sir Percival has got the makings of a really first-class son of a bitch,” I observed.

The hours after a battle are urgent and chaotic, with men’s lives hanging on a second’s action. Here a doctor can be heroic, knowing for certain that the wound just stanched has saved a life, that the quick intervention will save a limb. But in an epidemic, there is none of that. Then come the long days of constant watching and battles fought on the field of germs—and with no weapons suited to that field, it can be no more than a battle of delay, doing the small things that may not help but must be done, over and over and over again, fighting the invisible enemy of disease, in the tenuous hope that the body can be supported long enough to outlast its attacker.

“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. “Faith is as powerful a force as science,” he concluded, voice soft in the darkness, “—but far more dangerous.”