“It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.”

“Where d'ye think he is now?" Jenny said suddenly. "Ian, I mean."He glanced at the house, then at the new grave waiting, but of course that wasn't Ian any more. He was panicked for a moment, for his earlier emptiness returning-but then it came to him, and, without surprise, he knew what it was Ian had said to him."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.”

“But we are here, all of us. And we're here because I love you, more than the life that was mine. Because I believed you loved me the same way...will you tell me that's not true?No, he said after a moment, so softly I could barely hear him. His hand tightened harder on mine. No, I willna tell ye that. Not ever, Claire.”

“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. In 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.”

“Aye, well, he'll be wed a long time," he said callously. "Do him no harm to keep his breeches on for one night. And they do say that abstinence makes the heart grow firmer, no?""Absence," I said, dodging the spoon for a moment. "AND fonder. If anything's growing firmer from abstinence, it wouldn't be his heart.”

“He thought of such places in a way that had no words, only recognizing one when he came to it. He might have called it holy, save that the feel of such a place had nothing to do with church or saint. It was simply a place he belonged to be, and that was sufficient.”

“More than most men, he valued his name-I only hoped that given time, it would once more have value.”