Jim Butcher Quotes - Page 3

When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching -- they are your family.

You need to know where to go,' Sanya said.'Yes,''And you are going to consult four large pizzas for guidance.''Yes,' I said....'There is, I think, humour here which does not translate well from English into sanity.''That's pretty rich coming from the agnostic Knight of the Cross with a holy Sword who takes his orders from an archangel.' I said.- Harry Dresden & Sanya, Changes, Jim Butcher

Fear is really quite tedious. She wanted to be rid of it as soon as possible.

Honest. It's almost always best to go with honest. It means you never have to worry about getting your story straight.

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar

You're going to have to take care of yourself," Karrin said quietly. "Over the next few weeks. Rest. Give yourself a chance to heal. Keep the wound on your leg clean. Get to a doctor and get that arm into a proper cast. I know you can't feel it, but it's important that--"I stood, leaned over the bed, and kissed her on the mouth.Her words dissolved into a soft sound that vibrated against my lips. Then her good arm slid around my neck, and there wasn't any sound at all. It was a long kiss. A slow kiss. A good one. I didn't draw away until it came to its end. I didn't open my eyes for a moment after."...oh...," she said in a small voice. Her hand slid down my arm to lie upon mine."We do crazy things for love," I said quietly, and turned my hand over, fingers curling around hers.

Maybe this was a male-female translation problem. I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they're communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they're actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person's body language.That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that's like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we're having a conversation. Singular. We're paying attention to what is being said, considering that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been going on for the last several thousand years? I didn't even know that they ~existed~ until I read that stupid article, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.

Do you know what I think?" Marcone said."You think we should shoot Nicodemus in the back at the first opportunity and let Michael dismember him.""Yes."I drew my gun. "Okay.

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.

You have a visitor, my lord." I frowned, "What?" "That is why I came in here. You have a visitor waiting for you." I stood up, exasperated. "Why didn't you say so?" Lacuna looked confused. "I did. Just now. You were there." She frowned thoughtfully. "Perhaps you have brain damage." "It would not shock me in the least," I said."Would you like me to cut open your skull and check, my lord?" she asked. Someone that short should not be that disturbing.

The demon trapped in the summoning circle screamed, slamming its crablike pincers against the unseen barrier, hurling its chitinous shoulders from side to side in an effort to escape the confinement. It couldn't. I kept my will on the circle, kept the demon from bursting free."Satisfied, Chauncy?" I asked it.The demon straightened its hideous form and said, in a perfect Oxford accent, "Quite. You understand, I must observe the formalities.

Put some clothes on, you weird, yellow-eyed, table-dancing, werewolf-training, cryptic, stare-me-right-in-the-eyes-and-don't-even-blink wench.

Do you really think you can win?''Yeah. Hell, Ortega is only the third or fourth most disturbing thing I've tangled with today.''But even if you do win, what does it change?''Me getting kiilled now. That way, I get to be killed later tonight instead.'- Susan Rodriguez & Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher

Rain was coming down in sheets. I could hear it, on the concrete outside and on the old building above me. It creaked and swayed in the spring thunderstorm and the wind, timbers gently flexing, wise enough with age to give a little, rather than put up stubborn resistance until they broke. I could probably stand to learn something from that.

Home is where, when you go there and tell people to get out, they have to leave.

No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens? It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realized that they're so far over the line that they can't remember where it was.

Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells.

I'm so pretty, it's hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.

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.

We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.

You're reacted to the fear, but you haven't ever faced it and put it into the fight perspective. You have to make up your mind to overcome it.

It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart's intervention, I'd have been dead again already.That's right--you heard me: dead again already.I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?

A ship's captain was her master and the right hand of God in Heaven Himself, and concerned with matters of such grave importance that minor issues like food for the mortals in his command were entirely beneath him."I'll get someone else to take this duty, sir," Creedy said stoutly."The nonessential personnel are already on leave, XO," Grimm replied. "All the remaining hands are fully engaged in installing the new systems and making repairs. You know that.""But, sir," Creedy said. "What will the crew

Things are not always as bad as they seem. Sometimes, the darkness only makes it easier to see the light.

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.

It's all right to be afraid. You just don't let it stop you from doing your job.

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.

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.

... They paid some madman who thought he was a decorator a lot of money to make the place look hip and unique. May be it's my lack of fashion sense talking, but I thought they should have held out for one of those gorillas who has learned to paint. The results would have been of similar quality, and they could have paid in fresh produce.- Harry Dresden, Small Favor, Jim Butcher

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.

What is the point of having free will if one cannot occasionally spit in the eye of destiny?

Maybe,” he said in a slow, rural drawl, “you could explain to me why I found you in the middle of an orgy.” “Well,” I said, “if you’re going to be in an orgy, the middle is the best spot, isn’t it.

Hope is a force of nature. Don't let anyone tell you different.

She might be the Archive, but she's still a kid, Kincaid."He frowned and looked at me. "So?""So? Kids like cute."He blinked at me. "Cute?""Come on."I led him downstairs.On the lower level of the Oceanarium there's an inner ring of exhibits, too, containing both penguins and--wait for it--sea otters.I mean, come on, sea otters. They open abalone with rocks while floating on their backs.How much cuter does it get than small, fuzzy, floating, playful tool users with big, soft brown eyes?

You do everything by the book, like everybody else, you get the same results s everybody else.

You predicted quick victory. Now it’s going to get hopelessly complicated. Jesus, don’t you know any better than that by now?

Everything was perfectly healthy and normal here in Denial Land.

Think of every fairy-tale villainess you've ever heard of. Think of the wicked witches, the evil queens, the mad enchantresses. Think of the alluring sirens, the hungry ogresses, the savage she-beasts. Think of them and remember that somewhere, sometime, they've all been real.

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.

The last time I was at a supernatural shindig, I got poisoned and then everything there tried to kill me. So I burned the whole place to the ground.

I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it... I'm not agnostic. Just nonpartisan. Theological Switzerland, that's me.

Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?

There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family. Or more happy. Or more exasperated. Or more . . . secure.

Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights - another constant, those lights - humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation. And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.

My dear cousin has a very odd relationship with fear -- though mostly she's too busy to be bothered with it.

Give me passion -- and compassion -- any day.

Coz," he said. "You really must learn to shut your mouth from time to time. You'll taste less shoe letter.

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.

In the void, there is no distinction of east and west."Gwen blinked slightly at that. "I know all of those words, and yet when strung together like that I have no idea what they mean.

Like “love,” “hope” is one of those ridiculously disproportional words that by all rights should be a lot longer.

I like to think of it less as embezzling and more as an involuntary goodwill contribution.

Internet," she said sagely. "Expanding the frontiers of adolescent knowledge.

Have you ever been approached by a grim-looking man, carrying a naked sword with a blade about ten miles long in his hand, in the middle of the night, beneath the stars on the shores of Lake Michigan? If you have, seek professional help. If you have not, then believe you me, it can scare the bejeezus out of you.

I had this teacher who kept telling me that if I was ever in a fair fight, someone had made a mistake,” she said

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

Id me didn't have to be concerned with long-term consequences. He was my instinctive, primitive self, driven by my most primal impulses. I wondered, briefly, if 'id' and 'idiot' came from the same root.

Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.

...The next time I opened my eyes, I was in the morgue.This, all by itself, is enough to really ruin your day.I was lying on the examining table, and Butters, complete with his surgical gown and his tray of autopsy instruments, stood over me.'I'm not dead!' I sputtered. 'I'm not dead!'- Harry Dresden, Death Masks, Jim Butcher

Remember who you are. This creature wants to take it from you. Do not let him.