As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag.

— Diana Gabaldon

At the best of times, Father Bain's face resembled a clenched fist.

— Diana Gabaldon

Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger's touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-cheeked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body. But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am," and forms the core of personality. In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And "I am" grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh. The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven. The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves. In the next years, the hardening spreads from the center, as one finds and fixes the facets of the soul, until "I am" is set, delicate and detailed as an insect in amber.

— Diana Gabaldon

Blessed are those who eat greens, for they shall keep their teeth. Blessed are those who wash their hands after wiping their asses, for they shall not sicken. Blessed are those who boil water, for they shall be called saviors of mankind.

— Diana Gabaldon

Blood of my Blood," he whispered, "and bone of my bone. You carry me within ye, Claire, and ye Anna leave me now, no matter what happens, You are mine, always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I Wilma let ye go.

— Diana Gabaldon

Brave' covers everything from complete insanity and bloody disregard of other people's lives - generals tend to go in for that sort - to drunkenness, foolhardiness, and outright idiocy - to the sort of thing that will make a man sweat and tremble and throw up. . . And go and do what he thinks he has to do anyway.

— Diana Gabaldon

But I talk to you as I talk to my own soul," he said, turning me to face him. He reached up and cupped my cheek, fingers light on my temple." And, Sassenach," he whispered, "your face is my heart.

— Diana Gabaldon

But it wouldn’t have half the power of a story in which Jamie and Claire truly conquer real evil and thus show what real love is. Real love has real costs—and they’re worth it. I’ve always said all my books have a shape, and Outlander’s internal geometry consists of three slightly overlapping triangles. The apex of each triangle is one of the three emotional climaxes of the book: 1) when Claire makes her wrenching choice at the stones and stays with Jamie, 2) when she saves Jamie from Wentworth, and 3) when she saves his soul at the abbey. It would still be a good story if I’d had only 1 and 2—but (see above), the Rule of Three. A story that goes one, two, three, has a lot more impact than just a one–two punch.

— Diana Gabaldon

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. At that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.

— Diana Gabaldon

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

— Diana Gabaldon