An Echo in the Bone (Outlander, #7)

by Diana Gabaldon

“How did you know who I was?” His smile deepened as he glanced at my head. “The lieutenant said you’d be the curly-wig giving orders like a sergeant-major.” He looked round the field once more, shaking his head. “Good luck, ma’am.”

“When a man dies, it’s only him,” he said. “And one is much like another. Aye, a family needs a man, to feed them, protect them. But any decent man can do it. A woman …” His lips moved against my fingertips, a faint smile. “A woman takes life with her when she goes. A woman is … infinite possibility.”

Do women hold back the evolution of such things as freedom and other social ideals, out of fear for themselves or their children? Or do they in fact inspire such things—and the risks required to reach them—by providing the things worth fighting for? Not merely fighting to defend, either, but to propel forward, for a man wanted more for his children than he would ever have.

“Do you not think that the admission of such limits, a priori—and I do not mean only in the medical way, but in any arena of endeavor—that such an admission in itself establishes limits? That is, might that expectation prevent one from accomplishing all that is possible, because one assumes that something is not possible and therefore does not strive with all one’s power to achieve it?”

“I’ve heard it said that a man’s reach must exceed his grasp—or what’s a heaven for?”

It was possible to leave things behind—places, people, memories—at least for a time. But places held tight to the things that had happened in them, and to come again to a place you had once lived was to be brought face-to-face with what you had done there and who you had been.

All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death the key to the gate that bars memory.

“On your right, man.” On his right. Guarding his weak side. “He’s just here,” he said to Jenny, nodding to the spot between them. “Where he belongs.”