Jim Butcher Quotes

Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher is an American author. He has written the contemporary fantasy The Dresden Files, Codex Alera and Cinder Spires book series. (Jim Butcher Quotes)

“A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don’t care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching—they are your family. And they were my heroes.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“A bunch of people are gonna be mad at me, I’ve got some kind of medical issue that’s going to kill me in a while if I don’t deal with it, oh, and the island’s blowing up tomorrow and taking a whole lot of the country with it if I don’t fix it.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“A good man, almost by definition, would seriously question any decisions he made that led to such terrible consequences for others. Especially if those others trusted him.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“A more capable cat is never impressed by a less capable cat.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“A pure heart and mind only takes you so far – sooner or later the hormones have their say, too.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“A tumbleweed went rolling by in the street. I’m not even kidding. An actual, literal tumbleweed. Man, Oklahoma.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“A wonderful place, the mind, but if it has any kind of disappointing failure, it’s that it always attempts to put new things into the context of things which are already familiar to it.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Abusers like to isolate their victims. People who feel that they are completely alone tend not to fight back.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“Against anything human, more than one round to the head would be overkill: When the merely mortal goes up against the supernatural, there’s no such thing as overkill”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“Age is always advancing and I’m fairly sure it’s up to no good.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“All the things Science had promised us hadn’t come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn’t changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Ambitions are incompatible with consciences, you know. The two strangle one another straightaway and leave an awful mess behind them.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“An inferior sense of smell,” Marcus said, as if absolutely nothing of significance had happened, “is distinct from being told that one smells unpleasant.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“And for the glorious honor of being bitched at constantly and the esteemed title of Claims Investigator, he’d given up five years of his life as he went to college, created a debt his great-grandkids would curse him over, and got the holy honor of MBA. More Bullshit Allowed.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Lite

“And I knew that there was some dark corner of me that would enjoy using magic for killing—and then long for more. That was black magic, and it was easy to use. Easy and fun. Like Legos”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“And you both hurt each other terribly, because you’re family. Because what you say and do matters so much more than anyone else.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“Anger is just anger. It isn’t good. It isn’t bad. It just is. What you do with it is what matters. It’s like anything else. You can use it to build or to destroy. You just have to make the choice.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Animals do not do what they have done. Animals kill to eat, to defend themselves or their own, and to protect their territory. Not for the joy of it. Not for the lust of it…Only humans do that, wizard.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“As a race, we’re an enormous bunch of idiots. We’re more than capable of ignoring facts if the conclusions they lead to make us too uncomfortable. Or afraid.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“As much as I love to travel, I find that I miss my home there. Still, I suppose that I am glad to travel and even more glad to return. Perhaps I am doubly fortunate.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“At the end of the day, people have to be who they are. If you try to take that from them, you diminish them. You reduce them to children, unable to make decisions for themselves. There’s no way to poison your relationship with someone else faster.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“Because a sound tree doesn’t have bad roots, Amara. No enterprise of greatness begins with treachery, with lying to the people who trust and love you.”
Jim Butcher
Furies of Calderon

“Beer is an excellent argument that there is a God, and that furthermore, He wants us to be happy.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“Bloody constraint,” I told him. “For should you try to hide the girl from me, even in your heart, there shall I rake for her.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“Boobs are near the center of the universe, until you turn twenty-five or so. Which is also when young men’s auto insurance rates go down. This is not a coincidence.” (Jim Butcher Quotes)
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“Books were expensive, as well. But she’d read enough of them to know that they were only as valuable as the contents of their writers’ minds—and to her it seemed that a great many writers, had they been merchants, would have precious little inventory.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“But even with centuries of experience, I doubted any of them had ever been hit with a water balloon. Or with a holy-water balloon, either.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“But I’ve noticed that people got the most irrational whenever family was around—while simultaneously losing their ability to distinguish reason from insanity. I call it familial dementia.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“But on the upside, your seraph form will never age. And the only way to die is by a demon blade. As long you survive fighting them, you’re immortal to the things that would kill a normal human. Think of the money you’ll save on medical bills.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Lite

“But the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Call me paranoid, but there’s nothing like a murder attempt in broad daylight to make a man cautious.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“Caring about someone isn’t complicated. It isn’t easy. But it isn’t complicated, either. Kinda like lifting the engine block out of a car.”
Jim Butcher
Small Favor

“Children have their own kind of power. When you’re teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be. More understanding, more patient, more capable, more wise.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“Close your cowardly lips over that void in your head where your brains went missing and keep them there. Then put your lazy, shapeless ass back into your chair and do it swiftly. Or face me in the juris macto.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“Courage is about learning how to function despite the fear, to put aside your instincts to run or give in completely to the anger born from fear. Courage is about using your brain and your heart when every cell of your body is screaming at your to fight or flee – and then following through on what you believe is the right thing to do.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“Death is as light as a feather, duty heavier than a spire.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Death is certain, Aleran—for all of us. That being true, we know that all of those we love will either be torn away from us, or we will be torn away from them. It follows as naturally as the night after sundown.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“Death is only frightening from the near side.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“Death isn’t something anyone likes to think about, but the fact is that you can’t get out of it. No matter what you do, how much you exercise, how religiously you diet, or meditate, or pray, or how much money you donate to your church, there is a single hard, cold fact that faces everyone on earth: One day it’s going to be over. One day the sun will rise, the world will turn, people will go about their daily routines—only you won’t be in it. You’ll be still. And cold.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“Death should be a learning experience, after all, or what’s the point?”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“Despite my struggles, Mister had been an understanding soul, and I eventually came to realize that I was a part of his little family, and by his gracious consent was allowed to remain in his apartment. Cats. Go figure.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“Discretion is the better part of not getting exsanguinated.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“Don’t be a moron, Harry,” I said. “You came for the kid. He’s safe. That’s all you were obligated to do. Let it g—oh who am I kidding. There’s a girl.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“Doroga thumped a finger against his skull. Head got nothing to do with the heart. Your heart wants what it wants. Head got to learn that it can only kill the heart or else get out of the way”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“Each creature had something it excelled at, he supposed. Humans could manage knots easily, and cats could do everything else.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Even days that culminate in a grand battle against an insane ghost and a trip across the border between this world and the spirit realm usually start out pretty normally.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“Even in winter, the cold isn’t always bitter, and not every day is cruel.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don’t feel it.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Everything was perfectly healthy and normal here in Denial Land.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“Evil food smells amazing—which is either proof that there is a Satan or some equivalent out there, or that the Almighty doesn’t actually want everyone to eat organic tofu all the time. I can’t decide.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“Fear and anger always come hand in hand. Anger is my hiding place from fear, my shield and my sword against it.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“Fear is a funny thing. In the right light, even tiny and insignificant fears can suddenly grow, swelling up to monstrous proportions.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“Fear is a prison. But when you combine it with secrets, it becomes especially toxic, vicious. It puts us all into solitary, unable to hear one another clearly.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“Fear is bred from ignorance. So knowledge is a weapon against it, and reason is the tool of knowledge.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“For the sake of one soul. For one loved one. For one life.” I called power into my blasting rod, and its tip glowed incandescent white. “The way I see it, there’s nothing else worth fighting a war for.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“God isn’t about making good things happen to you,or bad things happen to you. He’s all about making choice – exercising the gift of free will.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“Got to die of something,” Giraldi observed. “Might as well put back a few pints while you wait to see what it is.”
Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury

“Growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you’re just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“Hardly a man ever made a fool of himself by keeping his bloody mouth shut.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“Harry waxes poetic about magic. He’ll go on and on about how it comes from your feelings, and how it’s a deep statement about the nature of your soul, and then he’ll whip out some kind of half-divine, half-insane philosophy he’s cobbled together from the words of saints and comic books about the importance of handling power responsibly.”
Jim Butcher
Backup

“Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn’t coming back?”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“He gave me a severe look over his spectacles and said, as if he thought the words were deadly venom and might kill me, “You are an untidy person.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“He sauntered over to me and rammed one shoulder playfully against my knee. I wavered, recovered my balance, and unlocked the door. Mister, as was his just due, entered before I did.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“He seemed to be at that most dangerous of ages, where strength, skill, and confidence met naïveté and idealism; when young men skilled at the crafts of violence could be manipulated into employing those skills with brutal efficiency–and without questions.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“He was wrong, that doesn’t make him a villian. That makes him an asshole.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“Heroism doesn’t pay very well. I try to be cold-blooded and money-oriented, but I keep screwing it up.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“Home is where, when you go there and tell people to get out, they have to leave.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn’t need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even if only in principle-there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“Honest. It’s almost always best to go with honest. It means you never have to worry about getting your story straight.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“Honey, I liked the Harry Potter movies, too, but that doesn’t mean I ran out and got a Dark Mark tattooed onto my left forearm like you did.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Lite

“Hope is a force of nature. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“Humans are scared of just about everything. Problem is, their first reaction to be scared- Is to kill it.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“I always thought it would get easier to be a person as I aged. But it just gets more and more complicated.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“I am blind and limited. I would be a fool think myself wise. And so, not knowing what the universe means, I can only try to be responsible with the knowledge, the strength, and the time given to me. I must be true to my heart.” (Jim Butcher Quotes)
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“I checked my gear, my pockets, my shoelaces, and realized that I had crossed the line between making sure I was ready and trying to postpone the inevitable.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“I could buy that she would murder me in a fit of rage, poison me out of flaming jealousy, or bomb my car out of sheer, stubborn pique. But she would never do it and feel nothing.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“I could taste the blood in my mouth, from where I had bitten into my tongue, and I either had to spit or swallow. I swallowed. No comments, please.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“I did the only thing any reasonable wizard could have done. I turned around and ran like hell.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“I didn’t realize you’d read much of the Bible.” “Proverbs always made a lot of sense to me,”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“I died. I died and someone made a clerical error and I am in Heaven.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“I do not need the written code of a spiritual belief to act like a decent human being.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“I don’t want to live in a world where the strong rule and the weak cower. I’d rather make a place where things are a little quieter. Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don’t come swooping out to snatch children from their cradles. Where vampires respect the limits, and where the faeries mind their p’s and q’s.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“I don’t know about your true form, but the weight of your ego sure is pushing the crust of the earth toward the breaking point.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“I felt my face stretch in a victorious smile. The potion had worked. I was inside. I had to suppress an urge to break into a soft shoe routine. Sometimes being able to use magic was so cool.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“I figure everyone is so insane about the internet there must be something cool there.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“I find it remarkable how often amateurs confuse courage with idiocy.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“I found him in a Dumpster one day when he was a kitten and he promptly adopted me. Despite my struggles, Mister had been an understanding soul, and I eventually came to realize that I was a part of his little family, and by his gracious consent was allowed to remain in his apartment. Cats. Go figure.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“I got the sneaking suspicion that the vampire was a couple of Peeps short of an Easter basket.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“I had a vague memory of being that ridiculous at one time. Let he who hath never worn parachute pants cast the first stone.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“I had to get up, to get on my feet, and get going, fast. You can’t keep a good wizard down.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“I had to smile at the man. I mean, you have to smile at idiots and children.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“I hate it when the real world ignores a perfectly logical, rational assumption.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“I just stood there staring, because while I’ve seen a lot of weird things, I hadn’t ever seen that.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“I kicked the door open, staff held ready to fight, and shouted, “And I’m all outta bubble gum!”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“I knew what it was like to have holes in my life in the shape of people who should have been there.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“I know it’s not thematically in tune with my new job and all, but I find it effective. Build a man a fire and he’s warm for a day,” I say. “But set a man on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life. Tao of Pratchett. I live by it.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“I leaned closer and gave her the look I usually save for rampaging demons and those survey people at malls.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“I let out a battle cry. Sure, a lot of people might have mistaken it for a sudden yelp of unmanly fear, but trust me: It was a battle cry.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“I let out a battle cry. Sure, a lot of people might have mistaken it for a sudden yelp of unmanly fear, but trust me. It was a battle cry.”
Jim Butcher
My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding

“I like dogs. They give Mister something to snack on.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“I like to think of it less as embezzling and more as an involuntary goodwill contribution.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“I may have had good reasons. I may have had the best of intentions. But intentions aren’t enough, no matter how good they are. Intentions can lead you to a place where you’re able to make a choice. It’s the choice that counts.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“I parked somewhere where I would probably get a ticket. I planned to ignore it. Anarchists have a much easier time finding parking spots.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“I sometimes give myself excellent advice. Occasionally, I even listen to it.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“I think men who lust for power are capable of almost anything.”
Jim Butcher
Furies of Calderon

“I think that men ought to treat women like something other than weaker men with breasts.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“I tried to be what I was meant to be, Father. It was never personal.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“I was seducing shepherdesses when you weren’t a twinkle in your great-grandcestor’s eyes. I think I know what I’m doing.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“I was staring into a mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw there.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“I will make Maggie safe. If the world burns because of that then so be it. Me and the kid will roast some marshmallows.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“I work in grand halls and bedchambers with wine and perfume. Not in dark alleyways with cloaks and knives. I don’t like knives. I don’t even own a knife. And my cloaks are far too expensive to risk bloodying.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“I would hit you on the head with a rock and drag you away from this. But it would only shatter the rock.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“I’d gone with my usual option. I was running through long tunnels filled with demons and monsters and nightmares, because it was easier than going to the gym.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“I’ll give the rat his due—he’s got balls that drag the ground when he walks.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“I’m at the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“I’m not a particularly strong man, but I’m made out of wire, and stubborn as hell.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“I’ve had a tense couple of days. And I’ve got to tell you, burning someone’s face off sounds like a great way to relax.”
Jim Butcher
Small Favor

“I’d hate to find out that the universe really wasn’t conspiring against me. It would jerk the rug out from under my persecution complex.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“If knowing how clueless I am is the measure of wisdom, I am freaking Solomon, Walter Cronkite, and Judge Judy all rolled into one.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“If one cannot learn from the mistakes of others, one might as well become a Democrat.”
Jim Butcher
My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding

“If you can’t stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they’re hanging around.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.” (Jim Butcher Quotes)
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“If you make some comment even obliquely alluding to menstruation or menopause and its effect on my judgment,” Murphy interrupted, “I will break your arm in eleven places.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“If you turn into a hideous monster and I am sent to slay you, I will remember this and make it as painless as I can, out of respect for you.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“If your opponent has you by fifty pounds, winning a fight against him is a dubious proposition, at best. If your opponent has you by eight thousand and fifty pounds, you’ve left the realm of combat and enrolled yourself in Road-kill 101. Or possibly in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.”
Jim Butcher
Small Favor

“Ignorance is more than bliss, it’s freaking orgasmic ecstacy!”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“I’m brilliant as well as skilled,” he said modestly. “It’s a great burden, all of that on top of my angelic good looks. But I try to soldier on as best I can.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“I’m so pretty, it’s hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“In my judgment, my buildings are considerably less likely to burn to the ground during one of your visits if you are disoriented from being treated like a sultan.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“In the action business, when you don’t want to say you ran like a mouse, you call it ‘taking cover.’ It’s more heroic.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“In the course of my life, I have more than once been too ignorant to know that something was impossible before I did it anyway.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“In the name of the Pizza Lord. Charge!”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“Intentions count for far less than the consequences of the actions born from them.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“It always shocked me how you could understand so many things and be such a complete idiot about so many others.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“It doesn’t make you a monster to want, she said, her voice very gentle. It’s what you do with it that matters.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“It is the nature of life. Something unexpected happens. Something goes wrong, and the plan must change.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“It isn’t about being fair and equal. It’s about the difference between right and wrong.” He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. “And this was wrong.”
Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury

“It isn’t complicated. You just open up and let someone in. And whatever comes after that, you face it together.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“‎It isn’t enough to stand up and fight darkness. You’ve got to stand apart from it, too. You’ve got to be different from it.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“It isn’t good to hold on too hard to the past. You can’t spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can’t see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be—even if it isn’t what you expected.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“It rained toads the day the White Council came to town.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“It was a well-known fact that humans became more addled than usual when running in herds.”

“It was like a fire in my thoughts, my concentration, burning ever more brightly, more pure, refining my anger, my hate, into something steel-hard, steel-sharp. I could feel it burning, and reached for it eagerly, shoving the pain inside to fuel my incandescent anger.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“It was never too late to learn something. The past is unalterable in any event. The future is the only thing we can change. Learning the lessons of the past is the only way to shape the present and the future.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store’s ambient stereo. The movie ofmy life must be really low-budget.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“It would, Grimm thought, be a horrible surprise to find out, mid-dive, that your ship had suddenly lost the ability to stop diving.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“It’s a rational sort of fear that puts a lawn chair down in the front of your thoughts and brings a cooler of drinks along with it.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“It’s easy to see what choices one should have made after it is too late to go back.”
Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury

“It’s a tradition,” Grimm said. “Were traditions rational, they’d be procedures.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“It’s all right to be afraid. You just don’t let it stop you from doing your job.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“It’s not everyone who can teach you something about faith without saying a word to do it.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“It’s one of the things that makes us different than they are, Harry. The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“I’ve always admired your ability to be unilaterally irritating.”
Jim Butcher
Small Favor

“I’ve always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“I’ve got blisters and muscle cramps in places not meant for the touch of anything but a beautiful woman,” Max spat back sullenly. “I’ve bitten my tongue so many times in the past three days that I whistle in musical chords when I exhale. And the smell isn’t ever going to come out of my armor, I just know it.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“I’ve never lost a duel to the death. Not one.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“Just because you start out as one thing, it doesn’t mean you can’t grow into something else.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Killing is not so easy as it seems. Most people are wired to be careful of their fellow human beings. Soldiers and cops both are specifically given training to overcome that instinct, and the criminals who fire at other people are usually driven to it by desperation.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“Know your enemy. Know yourself. Only then may you achieve victory.”
Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury

“Knowledge counters fear. It always has.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“Knowledge is the ultimate weapon. It always has been.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Knowledge is your weapon…Kill them with it.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“Kord sees power as something to satisfy his desires, instead of a tool to protect and serve the people beholden to him. It’s a stupid attitude, and it will eventually get him killed—but until then it makes him dangerous.”
Jim Butcher
Furies of Calderon

“Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“Laughter is good for you. Nine out of ten stand-up comedians recommend laughter in the face of intense stupidity.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“Laughter, like love, has power to survive the worst things life has to offer. And to do it with style.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“Let me be clear that I never offered House Astor an insult… Nor did I insult Reginald. I simply described him in accurate terms. If he finds himself insulted by the truth, it’s hardly my concern.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Let’s get something clear up front. I’m not Harry Dresden. Harry’s a wizard. A genuine, honest-to-goodness wizard. He’s Gandalf on crack and an IV of Red Bull, with a big leather coat and a .44 revolver in his pocket. He’ll spit in the eye of gods and demons alike if he thinks it needs to be done, and to hell with the consequences — and yet somehow my little brother manages to remain a decent human being. I’ll be damned if I know how. But then, I’ll be damned regardless. My name is Thomas Raith, and I’m a monster.”
Jim Butcher
Backup

“Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“Life is full of toil, sacrifice, and pain, and from the time we stop growing, we know that we’ve begun dying. We watch helplessly as year by year, our bodies age and fail, while our survival instincts compel us to keep on going-which means living with the terrifying knowledge that ultimately death is inescapable.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“Life is not notable for its overabundance of certainty.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“Life is precious, fragile, fleeting – and Murphy’s life was one of my favorites.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“Life is too short, Harry. And there’s nowhere near enough joy in it. If you find it, grab it. Before it’s gone.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“Life would be unbearably dull if we had answers to all our questions.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“Life, Tavi reflected, seldom makes a gift of what one expects or plans for.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“Living was a dangerous past-time, and often quite painful—but there was also such joy in living, such beauty, things that one would otherwise never see, never experience, never know. The risk of pain and loss was a part of living.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“Magic came from life itself, from the interaction of nature and the elements, from the energy of all living beings, and especially of people. A man’s magic demonstrates what sort of person he is, what is held most deeply inside of him. There is no truer gauge of a man’s character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Magic comes from the heart, from your feelings, your deepest expressions of desire. That’s why black magic is so easy – it comes from lust, from fear, from things that are easy to feed and make grow. The sort I do is harder. It comes from something deeper than that, a truer and purer source – harder to tap, harder to keep, but ultimately more elegant, more powerful.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“Magic is a kind of energy. It is given shape by human thoughts and emotions, by imagination. Thoughts define that shape—and words help to define those thoughts. That’s why wizards usually use words to help them with their spells. Words provide a sort of insulation as the energy of magic burns through a spell caster’s mind.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“Many things are not as they seem: The worst things in life never are.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Many women have earned titles, Your Grace. It doesn’t seem to have been a factor in whether or not they actually received them.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts. Try and convict me if I’m a bad person for thinking so. I enjoy treating a woman like a lady, opening doors for her, paying for shared meals, giving flowers – all that sort of thing.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Maybe the Merlin was right. Maybe its better to look stupid but strong, than it is to look smart but weak, I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to believe that the world stage bears that strong a resemblance to high school.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“Most of the bad guys in the real world don’t know that they are bad guys. You don’t get a flashing warning sign that you’re about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren’t looking.” (Jim Butcher Quotes)
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Omnibus

“My brief flash of relief and confidence melted away. Good thing it did, too. I’m sure the world would come to an end if I were allowed to feel a sense of relief and well-being for any length of time.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“My friend is going to save a little girl from monsters. I am going with him. That’s what friends do.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“My mouth kept running without checking in with my brain. My heart maybe, but not my brain.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“My wallet was getting even more anorexic than usual. At this rate I wouldn’t be able to afford to protect mankind from the perils of black magic. Hells bells, that would be really embarrassing.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“Nearly everyone underestimates how powerful the touch of another person’s hand can be. The need to be touched is something so primal, so fundamentally a part of our existence as human beings that its true impact upon us can be difficult to put into words. That power doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex, either. From the time we are infants, we learn to associate the touch of a human hand with safety, with comfort, with love.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“Night wasn’t so much falling as sharpening its claws.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“No matter how strong the vision, how powerful the image gained with the Sight, the future was always mutable, always something that could be changed.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“No matter how you disguise this trite bullshit, it’s my life, Jeff. Penned in an awkward manner. It’s things I didn’t want to see in black-and-white print. You’re lucky after three hundred years that I’ve mellowed. In my human days, I’d have slit your throat, pulled your tongue through the opening, and left you tied to a tree for the wolves to eat.”
Jim Butcher
My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding

“No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even – perhaps even especially – those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call ‘hard but necessary steps’ for the good of their nation. We’re all the hero of our own story.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“No one was standing in the shadows smoking a cigarette or looking about with a shifty-eyed gaze. I couldn’t see anyone quickly hiding a bloody knife behind his back or twirling a moustache, either. That ruled out the Dudley Do-Right approach to finding the killer.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“No rest for the wicked, Bob, and that means that we can’t slack off either, or they’ll outwork us.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“No story that juicy was going to stay secret for long.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“Noble intentions meant nothing. It was the results that counted. And the results of my actions had been telling a bald-faced lie to one of the only people I could come close to calling a friend.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Nobody can be bad at everything. There’s no such thing as a perfect screwup.”
Jim Butcher
Mean Streets

“Not even his father would assert that it was practical to manage five humans. It was a well-known fact that humans became more addled than usual when running in herds.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Not every man in the Senate is some kind of masterful schemer, exerting all his energies to acquire more power and influence at the expense of all others.” “No,” Isana agreed. “Some of them are incompetent schemers.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“Not that I was worried about anyone stealing my car. I once had a car thief offer to get me something better for a sweetheart rate.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“Nothing screws up a séance like the appearance of a real ghost. ~Jaime Vegas”
Jim Butcher
Blood Lite

“Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“Once you begin to mass-manufacture anything, by the very nature of the process, you lose the sense of personal attachment you might have to something made by hand.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“One can have only as much preparation as he has foresight.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“One of the first lessons a necromancer learns is the art of playing dumb. Of course, one problem with playing dumb is that is seeps into your everyday life. ~Jaime Vegas”
Jim Butcher
Blood Lite

“One rather thick volume was titled Means of Execution Through the Ages, and was placed with an elegant balance of nonchalance and availability at the eye level of anyone entering the room. As threats went, it was nearly subliminal—and perhaps it was placed there for that very reason.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Only the young think being called old is an insult,” I said, still smiling. “I am what I am, regardless of what anyone calls it. No one can change it, regardless of what anyone calls it. And it mostly means that nothing has managed to kill me yet.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“Open eyes are of little use when the mind behind them is closed.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“Over the course of many encounters and many years, I have successfully developed a standard operating procedure for dealing with big, nasty monsters.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it’s a big part, and sometimes it isn’t, but either way, it’s part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you’re alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Passion has overthrown tyrants and freed prisoners and slaves. Passion has brought justice where there was savagery. Passion has created freedom where there was nothing but fear. Passion has helped souls rise from the ashes of their horrible lives and build something better, stronger, more beautiful.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“People have far more power than they realize, if they would only choose to use it.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“People love dogs. You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Planning became a great deal simpler and easier when one didn’t have the additional bother of working out how to survive said plan.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“Regardless of what I think about Islam or Wicca or any other religion, the fact is that it’s a group of people. Every faith has its ceremonies. And since it’s made up of people, every faith also has its assholes.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“Relationships hadn’t ever really worked for me. I think it’s had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“Revenge is like sex, Mister Dresden. It’s best when it comes on slow, quiet, until it all seems inexorable.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Seedy wasn’t a fair description for the place, because seeds imply eventual regrowth and renewal.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“She could be a pain in the ass, but she was one gutsy chick. Her kids were lucky to have a mother like her. A lot of moms would say that they would die for their children. Charity had placed herself squarely in harm’s way to do exactly that.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“She focused on the work with the instant morning energy that can be possessed only by someone who has not yet discovered the immutable necessity of coffee.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“She staggered forward screaming and sobbing, bearing the torch aloft and certain that death was there for her, breathing softly, black wings rustling like those of the crows that waited, waited somewhere in the predawn darkness to sweep down on the eyes of the dead.”
Jim Butcher
Furies of Calderon

“Sleep is God. Go worship.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“Smiling always seems to annoy people more than actually insulting them. Or maybe I just have an annoying smile.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“So really, it was just as well that Godmother had caught up to me, in spite of my best efforts to avoid her. I’d hate to find out that the universe really wasn’t conspiring against me. It would jerk the rug out from under my persecution complex.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“Some things just aren’t meant to go together. Things like oil and water. Orange juice and toothpaste.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“Some words have a power that has nothing to do with supernatural forces. They resound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“Someone stake that bastard, please, and for the sake of the gods, dust Benny off the table by the fountain. The powder’s disgusting and it’s getting into the blood.”
Jim Butcher
My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding

“Sometimes I get tired of being the guy who is supposed to deal with un-deal-withable situations.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“Sometimes I hate having a conscience, and a stupidly thorough sense of honor.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“Sometimes I think that’s where most of us are. Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It’s that second bit that’s important.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“Sometimes I thought it might be nice not to make any choices. If I never had one, I could never screw it up.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“Sometimes it isn’t easy to be sane, smart, and responsible. Sometimes it sucks. Sucks wang. Camel wang. But that doesn’t turn wrong into right or stupid into smart.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“Sometimes you don’t know the most important things,” Tavi said. “You believe them.”
Jim Butcher
Princeps’ Fury

“Sometimes, son,” Count Calderon said, “you have to acknowledge that your future is in someone else’s hands.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“Speak only to those who listen. Anything else is a waste of breath. The answers to your questions were there, if you listened for them.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“Speed of lightning! Roar of thunder! Fighting all who rob or plunder! Underdog!”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“Strategy and tactics, discipline and protocol are necessary, but they’re just the beginning. You have to know people, Byron. How they think, what motivates them. Watch. Learn.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Strength is the first virtue,” Alera said. “That is not a pleasant fact. Its distastefulness does not alter the truth that without strength to protect them, all other virtues are ephemeral, ultimately meaningless.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“That’s how belief works. The worse the situation is, the more a man’s belief can do to sustain him. You’ve given them something to believe in.”
Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury

“That’s the great thing about being a wizard. I can always tell myself, honestly, that things could be worse.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“That’s the thing about knowledge, though. The more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“That’s the thing about living behind all that security: If it can keep threats out, it can just as easily keep you in.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“That’s so typical. You won’t steal a baby, but you’re too lazy to conjugate.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“The beginning of wisdom is in realizing that one knows nothing, then the beginning of understanding is in realizing that all things exist in accord with a single truth: Large things are made of smaller things.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“The best magic comes from the inside. Sometimes it’s just pure mental effort, raw willpower. Sometimes it’s emotions and feelings.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“The best thing about my faerie godmother is that the creepy just keeps on coming.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“The best way to keep yourself from doing something grossly self-destructive and stupid is to avoid the temptation to do it. For example, it is far easier to fend off inappropriate amorous desires if one runs screaming from the room every time a pretty girl comes in.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren’t any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader’s head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer’s work and skill and the reader’s imagination. Parents, of a sort.”
Jim Butcher
Small Favor

“The cold rain came down in buckets. I was shaking, shivering, and naked, and more soap was getting into my eyes. But hey. At least I was clean.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpations, but by the actions of the individual. The strongest city, the largest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person. In that dire moment of uncertainty, that person’s decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.”
Jim Butcher
Furies of Calderon

“The dead don’t need justice. That’s for those of us who are left looking down at the remains.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“The doors of Hell are never bolted or barred, to those who belong there.”
Jim Butcher
Mean Streets

“The end of the day, people have to be who they are. If you try to take that from them, you diminish them. You reduce them to children, unable to make decisions for themselves. There’s no way to poison your relationship with someone else faster.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“The energy of night was far different than that of the daylight—not inherently evil, but wilder, more dangerous, more unpredictable.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“The hardest lesson a wizard has to learn is that even with so much power, there are some things you can’t control. No matter how much you want to.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“The human mind isn’t a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn’t make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, standing outside in the cold and staring in at Christmas dinner. Relationships hadn’t ever really worked for me. I think it’s had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“The One created us all to be free. To learn. To find common cause with others and to grow stronger and wiser. But the ancient enemy perverts that union of strengths. With the enemy, there is no choice, no freedom. They take. They force a joining of all things, until nothing else remains.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“The only people who never hurt are dead.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“The pain we feel in life always grows. When we’re little, little pains hurt us. When we get bigger, we learn to handle more and more pain and carry on regardless.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“The past was gone. Nothing could change what had already been. Looking back at it, letting its wounds fester, indulging in regret was just a different, slower way to die. The living moved forward.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“The Queen closed her eye and nodded. She opened it again, and there was a tear tracking down her face. “I tried to be what I was meant to be, Father. It was never personal.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“The Shroud was old, and regarded as special, and people believed in it. That could be enough to give it a kind of power, all by itself.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“The wacky thing about those bad guys is that you can’t count on them to be obvious. They forget to wax their mustaches and goatees, leave their horns at home, send their black hats to the dry cleaner’s. They’re funny like that.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“The world always thinks that the destruction of a physical vessel is victory,” he said quietly. “But the Savior was more than merely cells and tissue and chemical compounds—and Fidelacchius is more than wood and steel.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“The world is getting weirder. Darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster, and threatening to go completely awry.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“The world might be vicious and treacherous and deadly, but it couldn’t kill laughter. Laughter, like love, has power to survive the worst things life has to offer. And to do it with style.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“The world might be vicious and treacherous and deadly, but it couldn’t kill laughter. Laughter, like love, has power to survive the worst things life has to offer. And to do it with style. It got me moving.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“The worst lies are almost always silence—or else truth, tainted with just enough deception to rot it to the core.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“the worst madmen don’t seem odd at all,” Grimm said. “They appear to be quite calm and rational, in fact. Until the screaming starts.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“There are bad things in the world. There’s no getting away from that. But that doesn’t mean nothing can be done about them. You can’t abandon life just because it’s scary, and just because sometimes you get hurt. ”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“There are moments in your life that, when you look back at them, you realize were perfect.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“There are moments in your life that, when you look back at them, you realize were perfect. A hundred million things had to happen, to all come together at the same time, for such moments to come into existence — so many things that it beggars imagination to think that they could possibly have happened by random chance. This was one of them.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“There are old swordsmen and bold swordsmen. But few old, bold swordsmen.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“There are people out there who enjoy hurting and scaring others. They’re going to keep doing it until you make them stop.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“There are some basic tenets that ninety-nine percent of all Wiccans follow, but at its core the faith is all about individual freedom. Wiccans believe that as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else by doing it, you should be free to act and worship in whatever way you’d like.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“There are some people who will never understand what loyalty means. They could tell you what it was, of course, but they will never know. They will never see it from the inside. They couldn’t imagine a world where something like that was real.” (Jim Butcher Quotes)
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“There are things you can’t walk away from. Not if you want to live with yourself afterward.”
Jim Butcher
Death Masks

“There aren’t any magical words, really. Words just hold the magic.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“There can be no faith without doubt. No strength without temptation.”
Jim Butcher
My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding

“There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.”
Jim Butcher
White Night

“There is hinkiness afoot with regard to my, ah, disposition.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“There is no spoon. I am completely spoonless over here.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“There is no truer gauge of a man’s character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“There is the world that should be and the world that is. We live in one and must create the other.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“There should be a rule against your own inner monologue throwing around that much sarcasm.”
Jim Butcher
Ghost Story

“There should be some kind of rule against needing to kill anything more than once.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“There was a flash, a tingling pain in my head, and then a lingering, dull ache. For some reason that didn’t surprise me. You don’t gain knowledge without a little pain.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“There was a ticking time bomb inside my head and the one person I trusted to go in and get it out hadn’t shown up or spoken to me for more than a year.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“There’s more magic in a baby’s first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don’t let anyone tell you any different. Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can’t weave together a spell that you don’t believe in.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“There’s always, always a choice. My options might really, truly suck, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a choice.”
Jim Butcher
Cold Days

“There’s more magic in a baby’s first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
Jim Butcher
Fool Moon

“They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we’ve got nothing, nothing at all, on women.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“Things are not always as bad as they seem. Sometimes, the darkness only makes it easier to see the light.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“This is Nightside,” said Deadboy. “We do ten impossible things before breakfast, just fora cheap thrill. Abandon all taboos, ye who enter here.”
Jim Butcher
Mean Streets

“This is what it look like when it WORKS?”
Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury

“Thomas scowled. “An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“Those who deal in magic learn to see the world in a slightly different light than everyone else. You gain a perspective you had never considered before, a way of thinking that would just never have occurred to you without exposure to the things a wizard sees and hears.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Those who had never seen a tribe of cats at war, or at least playing war games, would look upon what came next as utter chaos.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“Those who have such a family seldom realize how rare and precious it is.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don’t want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don’t want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.”
Jim Butcher
Dead Beat

“Truth does not become untruth simply because its existence upsets the scion of a High House.”
Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass

“We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“We’ve both got into the blue beetle. He got into the red door, I got into the white one.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“What one deserves and what one experiences are seldom congruent.”
Jim Butcher
First Lord’s Fury

“What was it Grandpa used to say? ‘You may pawn your soul to the devil, but the good Lord will always bail you out?”
Jim Butcher
Blood Lite

“Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“When a mortal dreams, all kinds of strange things can happen. When a wizard dreams, it can be even weirder. Sometimes, dreams can be intense enough to create a little, temporary world of their own.”
Jim Butcher
Grave Peril

“When I’m in turmoil, when I can’t think, when I’m exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It’s just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“When I’m in turmoil, when I can’t think, when I’m exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It’s just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 1-6

“When kind men grow angry, things are about to change.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“When most people lose control of their anger, someone gets hurt. Maybe someone even gets killed. When it happens to a wizard, insurance companies go broke and there’s reconstruction afterward.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“When people come to the only professional wizard in the Chicago phone book for help, they’re one of two things: desperate or smart. Very rarely are they both.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“Whenever it gets too dark, think of the good things you have, the good times you’ve had. It will help. I promise.”
Jim Butcher
Side Jobs

“Whenever you’ve got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn’t always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.”
Jim Butcher
Working for Bigfoot

“Where instinct fails, intellect must venture.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Wizardry is all about thinking ahead, about being prepared. Wizards aren’t really superhuman. We just have a leg up on seeing things more clearly than other people, and being able to use the extra information we have for our benefit.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“Wizards control their power. They don’t let it control them. And wizards don’t use magic to kill people. They use it to discover, to protect, to mend, to help. Not to destroy.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Worry is fear in disguise. And fear will eat you from the inside out if you let it.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“You backbiting, poisonous, treacherous, deceitful, wicked, clever girl. If this works I’ll buy you a pony.”
Jim Butcher
Summer Knight

“You beg fate to make your fears into reality, Aleran. But for the moment, they are only fears. They may come. If so, then face them and overcome them. Until then, pay them no mind. You have enough to think on.”
Jim Butcher
Cursor’s Fury

“You can be as sincere as hell and still be wrong.”
Jim Butcher
Small Favor

“You can tell a lot about a man from how he treats his dog,”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“You can’t go around making people’s choices for them. Not if you love them.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“You can’t abandon life just because it’s scary, and just because you get hurt.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“You can’t plan for everything or you never get started in the first place.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“You destroy buildings, fight monsters openly in the streets of the city, work with the police, show up in newspapers, advertise in the phone book, and ride zombie dinosaurs down Michigan Avenue, and think that you work in the shadows? Be reasonable.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“You don’t gain knowledge without a little pain.”
Jim Butcher
Blood Rites

“You don’t think about everything you have to do. You focus on one thing and get it done, then move on to the next.”
Jim Butcher
The Dresden Files Collection 7-12

“You don’t go walking into the proverbial lion’s den lightly. You start with a good breakfast.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“You don’t take your cat with you to go bird shopping. Not because the cat isn’t polite, but because he’s a cat.”
Jim Butcher
Changes

“You have enemies enough without tearing open your own wounds over things you could not have prevented.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“You have to find solutions where you can, not where convenient.”
Jim Butcher
Turn Coat

“You have to realize when you’ve reached the limits of what you can choose to do to change the situation.”
Jim Butcher
Peace Talks

“You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty

“You know the law, Dresden.” “He who kills the cheer springs for beer,” chanted the rest of the table.”
Jim Butcher
Backup

“You never get a straight answer from captains. You should know that by now.”
Jim Butcher
Captain’s Fury

“You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!”
Jim Butcher
Small Favor

“You think your power is what shapes the world you walk in. But that is an illusion. Your choices shape your world. You think your power will protect you from the consequences of those choices. But you are wrong. You create your own rewards. There is a Judge. There is Justice in this world. And one day you will receive what you have earned. Choose carefully.”
Jim Butcher
Skin Game

“You will probably find, in life, that successes and victories tend to overshadow the risks you took, while failure will amplify how idiotic they were.”
Jim Butcher
Academ’s Fury

“You’re an idiot. You’re an idealist. Open your eyes, man. You’re in the jungle, now. It’s survival of the fittest, and you’ve proved yourself unfit. The strong do as they wish, and the weak get trampled. When this is over, I’m going to wipe you off my shoe and keep going like you never existed.”
Jim Butcher
Storm Front

“Your ability to comprehend your environment is very strongly defined by your belief in a number of illusions. Time. Truth. Love.”
Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty