Jim Butcher Quotes

Harry Dresden: 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.

Harry Dresden: Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over--a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it's binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?

Molly Carpenter: Wrote the Laws of Magic, founded the White Council, was custodian of one of the Swords and established a stronghold for the Council, too. He must have been something else.
Harry Dresden: He must have been a real bastard. Guys who get their name splashed all over history and folklore don't tend to be Boy Scout troop leaders.
Molly Carpenter: You're such a cynic.
Harry Dresden: I think cynics are playful and cute.

Michael Carpenter: I still can’t believe, that you came to the Vampires’ Masquerade Ball dressed as a vampire.
Harry Dresden: Not only that, but a cheesy vampire.

I'd never seen anyone go truly, old-school berserkergang, but that scream...It was like hearing an echo rolling down through the centuries from an ancient world, a more savage world, now lost to the mists of time. And suddenly I had no trouble at all believing her age.

Waldo Butters: Screw up my life?
[He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan]
Waldo Butters: I’m a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow.
[He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said]
Waldo Butters: Do your worst.

Harry Dresden: As I pulled into the parking lot, I reflected that odds were that not a lot of clandestine meetings involving mystical assassination, theft of arcane power, and the balance of power in the realms of the supernatural had taken place in a Wal-Mart Super Center. But then again, maybe they had. Hell, for all I knew, the Mole Men used the changing rooms as a place to discuss plans for world domination with the Psychic Jellyfish from Planet X and the Disembodied Brains-in-a-Jar from the Klaatuu Nebula. I know I wouldn’t have looked for them there.

Harry Dresden: Santa is a much bigger and more powerful faery than Toot, and I don't know his true name anyway. You'd never see me trying to nab Saint Nick in a magic circle even if I did. I don't think anyone has stones that big.

Marcone: In my judgment, my buildings are less likely to burn to the ground during one of your visits if you are disoriented from being treated like a sultan.

Open eyes are of little use when the mind behind them is closed.

Harry Dresden: There’s power in the night. There’s terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when the darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear. Get a good ways out from civilization-say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake-and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. 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. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts. And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things.

Bob Here's where I ask why don't you spend your time doing something safer and more boring. Like maybe administering suppositories to rabid gorillas.

Harry Dresden: There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard. It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed. By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder. The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire's crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil. The vampire gasped and writhed a little more. The timer popped out of the turkey. Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain't something you see twice. "For my next trick," I panted into the startled silence, "anvils."

Harry Dresden: You don't explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor.

Karrin Murphy: I'm pretty sure there's no Nobel prize for pornography.