Jim Butcher

“Kincaid! Bolshevik Muppet!”

“I died. I died and someone made a clerical error and I am in Heaven.”

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

“Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?”

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

“Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn't learned, though, that 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. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - gradutaing, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expecations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens. And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life.Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's a 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.”

“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!”

“My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour.”

“Those who deal in magic learn to see the world in a slightly differnt light than everybody else.you gain a perspective you had considered before. A way of thinking that would never have occurred to you with out exposure to the things a wizard sees and hears.When you look in to some ones eyes you see them in that other light and for just a second they see you in the same way. ”

“Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead," I said solemnly, "and frosting of white.”

“Me and polite have never been on close terms.”

“In the name of the Pizza Lord. Charge!”

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

“Harry," Bob drawled, his eye lights flickering smugly, "what you know about women, I could juggle.”

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

“There are old swordsmen and bold swordsmen. But few old, bold swordsmen.”

“My hair had grown out long and shaggy—not in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way.”