Diana Gabaldon: Likeness

“I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.”

“Where did you learn to kiss like that?” I said, a little breathless. He grinned and pulled me close again.

“I said I was a virgin, not a monk,” he said, kissing me again. “If I find I need guidance, I’ll ask.”

“It wasn't a thing I had consciously missed, but having it now reminded me of the joy of it; that drowsy intimacy in which a man's body is accessible to you as your own, the strange shapes and textures of it like a sudden extension of your own limbs.”

“It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.”

“I'll scream!"
"Likely. If not before, certainly during. I expect they'll hear ye at the next farm; you've got good lungs.”

“I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rotting bull. I dinna understand myself.”

“My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too -- enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser”

“And you, my Sassenach? What were you born for? To be lady of a manor, or to sleep in the fields like a gypsy? To be a healer, or a don's wife, or an outlaw's lady?"

"I was born for you," I said simply, and held out my arms to him.”

“I'll leave it to you, Sassenach," he said dryly, "to imagine what it feels like to arrive unexpectedly in the midst of a brothel, in possession of a verra large sausage.”

“Oh, Lord!" This must be what it's like to make love in Hell," he whispered. "With a burning she-devil.”

“I only said I felt like God, Sassenach," he murmured. "I never said I was.”

“I thought I could make out Jamie's Highland screech, but that was likely imagination; they all sounded equally demented.”

“Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…”

“Jamie, I had found out by accident a few days previously, had never mastered the art of winking one eye. Instead, he blinked solemnly, like a large red owl.”