Nay, he needs a woman, not a girl. And Laoghaire will be a girl when she’s fifty.

When the day shall come that we do part," he said softly, and turned to look at me, "if my last words are not 'I love you'-ye'll ken it was because I didna have time.

Does it ever stop? The wanting you?" "Even when I've just left ye. I want you so much my chest feels tight and my fingers ache with wanting to touch ye again.

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

Torn between the impulse to stroke his head, and the urge to cave it in with a rock, I did neither.

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.

For so many years, for so long, I have been so many things, so many different men. But here," he said, so softly I could barely hear him, "here in the dark, with you… I have no name.

One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.

Lord, ye gave me a rare woman, and God! I loved her well.

You dinna need to understand me, Sassenach," he said quietly. "So long as you love me.

D'ye ken that the only time I am without pain is in your bed, Sassenach? When I take ye, when I lie in your arms-my wounds are healed, then, my scars forgotten.

Life belongs to optimists. Pessimists are just viewers. Making it real, starts with our attitude.

Ninety-nine percent of all work on self is attitudinal.

Beauty in all things-no, we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it.

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

Once upon a time," he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats, well here I am.

A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling.

This earth will be looked back on like a lowly home, and this life of ours be remembered like a short apprenticeship to duty.