“Days are precious, dinna lose them. Flo`ers will fade and so will ye... Come to me, ye fair young maidens. While young and fair ye still may be.”

“I will keep my bulk. All of it, if ye dinna mind. I will have need of it, thank ye." Derrick”

“I've thought that perhaps that's why women are so often sad, once the child's born," she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. "Ye think of them while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they're born, and they're different - not the way ye thought of them inside, at all. And ye love them, o' course, and get to know them they way they are...but still, there's the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it's the grievin' for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms.”

“If I die," he whispered in the dark, "dinna follow me. The bairns will need ye. Stay for them. I can wait.”

“'Twas on an evening fair I went to take the air,I heard a maid making her moan;Said, 'Saw ye my father? Or saw ye my mother? Or saw ye my brother John?Or saw ye the lad I that I love best,And his name it is Sweet William?”

“A friend once told me 'The body has nay conscience.' I dinna ken that that's entirely so-but it is true that the body doesna generally admit the possibility of nonexistence. And if ye exist-well, ye need food, that's all.”