Jim Butcher

“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.”

“Because nothing says flattery like a gun to the head.”

“Could a man's heart, his soul, perish and yet leave him walking and talking as if alive?”

“She looked up at me with a polite smile, her dark hair long and appealing...I liked the smile. Maybe I didn't look like a beaten-up bum. Maybe on me it just looked ruggedly determined."I'm sorry, sir," she said, "but the addiction counseling center is on twenty-six." Sigh.”

“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.”

“We're all so damned fragile.”

“You can't plan for everything or you never get started in the first place.”

“Sheep can befriend a hungry wolf only for briefly.”

“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.”

“Felicia managed to stagger to her feet, open the front door, and limp haltingly to the white limousine idling on the snowy street outside the house. Murphy went to the window to watch Felicia get into the limo and depart."Yeah," I said, deadpan. "The little blond woman has two of them.”

“I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant "I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue.”

“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.”

“Injun Joe studied the body for a moment, his eyes sad. Then he said, "I'd rather go in my sleep, I think." He glanced back at me. "What about you?""I want to be stepped on by an elephant while having sex with identical triplet cheerleaders," I said.”

“Molly, you are a good person. Don't let anyone take that away from you. Not even yourself.”

“I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.”

“Now, Lily said, her burning voice bitter. Now you give me a choice. The ministar flared to life in her palm again. Thus do I choose, you son of a bitch. Knight of Winter, burn and die.”

“The impossible we do immediately. The unimaginable takes a little while.”

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

“Fire isn't always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Yeah, they look great, but that isn't a fantasy come true, Harry. That's a wood chipper in Playboy bunny clothing.”

“Stop learning, start dying.”

“Everything was perfectly healthy and normal here in Denial Land.”

“People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain't so.”

“Wait. You work for me?""I prefer to think of it as managing your incompetence.”

“This is Waldo Butters, and his geek penis is longer and harder than any of ours put together.”

“Dresden. Am I interrupting something?""Well, I was going to settle down with a porn video and a bottle of baby oil, but I really don't have enough for two.”

“I clenched my jaw as hard as I could. It wasn't much of a stretch to keep pretending to be angry, but I tried to go all Method actor on them. Eat your heart out, Sir Ian.”

“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.”

“Maybe they'd use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they'd crash the world economy. Maybe they'd turn every program on television into one of those reality shows.""That's mostly done already, Harry.""Oh. Well. I've got to believe that the world is worth saving anyway.”

“It turns out that Molly wasn't her mother's daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGuyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly ...Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don't know how.”

“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.”

“You can be as sincere as hell and still be wrong.”

“I ask people impertinent questions. Hopefully turning up pertinent answers.”

“It's hard to think when someone's trying to kill you. We human beings aren't wired to be rational and creative when we know our lives are in danger of a swift and violent end. The body has definite ideas of which survival strategies it prefers to embrace, and those are generally limited to "rip threat to pieces" or "run like hell." No thinking need be involved, as far as our instincts are concerned.Our instincts were a long time in the making, though, and the threats that can come after us now have outpaced them. You can't outrun a bullet, and you don't go hand-to-hand with a gunman unless you're certain you are about to die anyway. Speed and mindless aggression weren't going to keep me alive.”

“Keep it up, wise guy. I'm always going to be taller than you once you're lying unconscious on the ground.”

“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.”Thomas gave me a steady look. “So,” he said. “Same old, same old.”

“[Mouse is] with us. The dog is a handicap-assist animal."The kid lifted his eyebrows."My mouth is partially paralyzed," I said. "It makes it hard for me to read. He's here to help me with the big words. Tell me if I'm supposed to push or pull on doors, that kind of thing.”

“Bigots see something they expect and then they stop thinking about what is in front of them. It's probably how they got to be bigots in the first place.”

“Here there be monster." Bob whispered, half hysterically. "Run! Run already!”

“Men plan. Fate Laughs.”

“It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick.""Six feet long.""It's traditional Ozark folk art.""With dents and nicks all over it."I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?""Get a blanket." He held out his hand. I signed and passed my staff over to him. "Do I get a receipt?"He took a notepad from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he passed it over to me. It read: Received, one six foot tall traditional Ozark walking club from Mr. Smart-Ass.”

“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 put the ick in magic.”

“I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.”

“Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get outof here."She snorted. "Like hell.""I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York.”

“So?" Bob said. "Hat up, go kill her. Problem solved." "Bob," I said. "You can't just go around killing people." "I know. That's why you should do it." "No, no. I can't go around killing people, either.”

“When you do something stupid and die, it's pathetic,” I said. “When you do something stupid and survive it, then you get to call it impressive or heroic.”

“I believe that there's a cloud for every silver lining,' I said.”