Jim Butcher Quotes

Maybe this is what it feels like for civilians when they see cops doing some of the dirty work. A lot of times they don’t understand what’s happening. They see something they don’t like and it upsets them—because they don’t have the full story, aren’t personally facing the problem, and don’t know how much worse the alternative could be.

~ Jim Butcher

Smiling always seems to annoy people more than actually insulting them. Or maybe I just have an annoying smile.

~ Jim Butcher

As far as the Council is concerned, the U.S. Wardens are a bunch of mushrooms.Eh?Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit.

~ Jim Butcher

Being here? With you? I've met my subconscious, and he's not that sick.

~ Jim Butcher

Billy squinted at me. Why are you letting them go?Because they're real.How do you know?The one I was holding crapped on my hand.

~ Jim Butcher

Ease off the martyr throttle.

~ Jim Butcher

Seedy wasn't a fair description for the place, because seeds imply eventual regrowth and renewal.

~ Jim Butcher

...as nervous as a bird in a coal mine.

~ Jim Butcher

Thomas has the kind of whiter-than-white boyish grin that makes women's panties spontaneously evaporate.

~ Jim Butcher

What's with that?” Butters screamed, his voice high and frightened. “Just covering his head with his arms? Didn't he see the lawyer in the movie?

~ Jim Butcher

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.

~ Jim Butcher

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

~ Jim Butcher

I had about as much chance to do that as I did of backpacking my car to the top of Mount Rushmore.

~ Jim Butcher

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

~ Jim Butcher

Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.

~ Jim Butcher

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

That’s the problem with you nearly immortal types,” I said. “You couldn’t spot a pop culture reference if it skittered up and implanted an embryo down your esophagus.

~ Jim Butcher

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

Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!

~ Jim Butcher

You’re playing the creepy vibe a little hard,” I said. “Might as well go for broke, put on a black top hat and pipe in some organ music.

~ Jim Butcher

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.

~ Jim Butcher

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

She studied my face for a long minute. Are you going to help my mom? It was a simple question. But how do you tell a child that things just aren't that simple, that some questions don't have simple answers--or any answer at all?

~ Jim Butcher

I kept a straight face while my inner Neanderthal spluttered and then went on a mental rampage through a hypothetical produce section, knocking over shelves and spattering fruit everywhere in sheer frustration, screaming, 'JUST TELL ME WHOSE SKULL TO CRACK WITH MY CLUB, DAMMIT!

~ Jim Butcher

‎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

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

~ Jim Butcher

On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.

~ Jim Butcher

Harry, life isn't simple. There is such a thing as black and white. Right and wrong. But when you're in the thick of things, sometimes it's hard for us to tell. You didn't do what you did for your own benefit. You did it so that you could protect others. That doesn't make it right - but it doesn't make you a monster, either. You still have free will. You still get to choose what you will do and what you will be and what you will become.

~ Jim Butcher

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

Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean when you think about it jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research blood sweat tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.But get on any flight in the country and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who in the face of all that incredible achievement will be willing to complain about the drinks.

~ Jim Butcher

He had traded the lives of people he did not know for those of men he did.That was, he supposed, human nature.

~ Jim Butcher

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

~ Jim Butcher

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

~ Jim Butcher

There's always, always a choice. My options might really, truly suck, but that doesn't mean there isn't a choice.

~ Jim Butcher

A pair of dolphins swept by us in the water, flicking their heads out to get a look at us as they went. One of them made a chittering sound that wasn't very melodic. The other twitched its tail and splashed a little water our way, all in good fun. They weren't the attractive Flipper kind of dolphins. They were regular dolphins that aren't as pretty and don't get cast on television. Maybe they just refused to sell out and see a plastic surgeon. I held up a fist to them. Represent.

~ Jim Butcher

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.

~ Jim Butcher

Raw power doesn't determine all that you can do with magic. Focus matters, too. The better your focus is, the better you are at putting your power in one place at the same time, the more you can get done.

~ Jim Butcher

Vanity, thy name is vampire.

~ Jim Butcher

I sidestepped the vampire's rush, and drove my half of the former blasting rod down at its back, Buffy-like.Maybe it works better on television.

~ Jim Butcher

Rowl reminded himself that cats were eternally patient, and that he would not simply explode if he did not fling himself from Littlemouse's arms and go exploring. Which was not to say that he could not do so if he wished, because cats were also their own masters. He decided that his patience was practically legendary- which was fortunate...

~ Jim Butcher