Jim Butcher Quotes - Page 5

I sometimes give myself excellent advice. Occasionally, I even listen to it.
Jim Butcher
It's tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.
Jim Butcher
See, those who wield the primordial forces of creation have a long-running grudge with physics.
Jim Butcher
You're supposed to be a spirit of intellect. I don't understand why you're obsessed with sex."Bob's voice got defensive. "It's an academic interest, Harry.""Oh yeah? Well maybe I don't think it's fair to let your academia go peeping in other people's ho
Jim Butcher
Let come the forces of night! We will stand!" "We will get the hell out of here is what we will do," I muttered.
Jim Butcher
Bob, would you be willing to take on Evil Bob?"Bob's eyes darted nervously. "I'd . . . prefer not to. I'd really, really prefer not to. You have no idea. That me was crazy. And buff. He worked out.
Jim Butcher
I sometimes give myself excellent advice. Occasionally, I even listen to it.
Jim Butcher
It's tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.
Jim Butcher
Isana felt her throat tighten. "We failed." Serai lifted her chin and patted Isana's arm firmly."We have not yet succeeded. There is a difference.
Jim Butcher
HOW CAN YOU KNOW THIS?” the Voice demanded.“I look at things and think about them,” Folly replied. “And use my intuition, of course, and deduction and induction, as well as any historical or theoretical models that seem to apply.
Jim Butcher
I am blind and limited. I would be a fool think myself wise. And so, not knowing what the universe means, I can only try to be responsible with the knowledge, the strength, and the time given to me. I must be true to my heart.
Jim Butcher
I know how you feel," I said. "You run into something you totally don't get, and it's scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.
Jim Butcher
Knowledge is the ultimate weapon. It always has been.
Jim Butcher
But you'd get arguments from all kinds of people that the Bible has got to be perfect. That God would not permit such errors to be made in the Holy Word.""I thought God gave everyone free will. Which would presumably - and evidently - include the freedom to be incorrect when translating one language into another.""Stop making me think. I'm believing over here.
Jim Butcher
I'm not a Wiccan. I'm not big on churches of any kind, despite the fact that I've spoken, face-to-face, with an archangel of the Almighty.But there were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn't about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn't about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine.Faith is about what you do. It's about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It's about making sacrifices for the good of others--even when there's not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are.Faith is a power of its own, and one even more elusive and difficult to define than magic.
Jim Butcher
Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy.
Jim Butcher
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?
Jim Butcher
They don't make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it's partly because it must be eisier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can't be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It's where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives.Maybe it says somthing about people. Maybe for us, under the earth is a subtle and profound statement. Maybe ground level provides us with a kind of symbolic boundary marker, an artificial construct that helps us remember that we are alive. Mabye it helps us push death's shadow back from our lives.I live in a basement apartment and like it. What does that say about me?Probably that I overanalyze things.
Jim Butcher
If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.
Jim Butcher
Magic comes from the heart, from your feelings, your deepest expressions of desire. That's why black magic is so easy—it comes from lust, from fear and anger, from things that are easy to feed and make grow. The sort I do is harder. It comes from something deeper than that, a truer and purer source—harder to tap, harder to keep, but ultimately more elegant, more powerful. 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. It came from my love of a good steak, from the way I would sometimes cry at a good movie or a moving symphony. From my life. From the hope that I could make things better for someone else, if not always for me. Somewhere, in all of that, I touched on something that wasn't tapped out, in spite of how horrible the past days had been, something that hadn't gone cold and numb inside of me. I grasped it, held it in my hand like a firefly, and willed its energy out, into the circle I had created with the spinning amulet on the end of its chain.
Jim Butcher
Hope is a force of nature. Don't let anyone tell you different.
Jim Butcher
Fear was wisdom in a situation like this, and he was pleased that Folly was obviously intelligent enough to know it. He hoped that she would use the fear to make her cleverer, rather than more foolish, but that was asking much of a human, relatively odd or not.
Jim Butcher
Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.
Jim Butcher
Well, I never been to much school, you understand, but it seems to me that you're assuming something you shouldn't assume... that God sees the world like you do; one thing at a time, from just one spot. Seems to me that he's supposed to be everywhere, know everything. ...Think about that; he knows what you're feeling, how you're hurting. Feels my pain, your pain like it was his own. Hell son, the question isn't how God could care about just one person; question is, how could he not?
Jim Butcher
But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.
Jim Butcher
God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices--exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.
Jim Butcher
I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it... I'm not agnostic. Just nonpartisan. Theological Switzerland, that's me.
Jim Butcher
Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.
Jim Butcher
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.
Jim Butcher
Age is always advancing and I'm fairly sure it's up to no good.
Jim Butcher
I have nightmares about hell, where all I do is add up numbers and try to have conversations with people like you.
Jim Butcher
Don't call me a dinosaur. It isn't fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?
Jim Butcher
Home is where, when you go there and tell people to get out, they have to leave.
Jim Butcher
There was a sound like a human yawn, and then the skull turned slightly toward me and asked, "What's up, boss?""Evil's afoot.""Well, sure," Bob said, "because it refuses to learn the metric system. Otherwise it'd be up to a meter by now.
Jim Butcher
See? This is why I'm not religious. I couldn't possibly keep my mouth shut long enough to get along with everyone else.
Jim Butcher
Black Court vampires. I just shortened it some."Ebenezar tsked. "Blampires. That's the problem with you young people. Shortening all the words.
Jim Butcher
Laughter is good for you. Nine out of ten stand-up comedians recommend laughter in the face of intense stupidity.
Jim Butcher
Da. This is going very well already."Thomas barked out a laugh. "There are seven of us against the Red King and his thirteen most powerful nobles, and it's going well?"Mouse sneezed."Eight," Thomas corrected himself. He rolled his eyes and said, "And the psycho death faerie makes it nine.""It is like movie," Sanya said, nodding. "Dibs on Legolas.""Are you kidding?" Thomas said. "I'm obviously Legolas. You're . . ." He squinted thoughtfully at Sanya and then at Martin. "Well. He's Boromir and you're clearly Aragorn.""Martin is so dour, he is more like Gimli." Sanya pointed at Susan. "Her sword is much more like Aragorn's.""Aragorn wishes he looked that good," countered Thomas."What about Karrin?" Sanya asked."What--for Gimli?" Thomas mused. "She is fairly--""Finish that sentence, Raith, and we throw down," said Murphy in a calm, level voice."Tough," Thomas said, his expression aggrieved. "I was going to say 'tough.' "As the discussion went on--with Molly's sponsorship, Mouse was lobbying to claim Gimli on the basis of being the shortest, the stoutest, and the hairiest--"Sanya," I said. "Who did I get cast as?""Sam," Sanya said.I blinked at him. "Not . . . Oh, for crying out loud, it was perfectly obvious who I should have been."Sanya shrugged. "It was no contest. They gave Gandalf to your godmother. You got Sam.
Jim Butcher
Heroism doesn't pay very well. I try to be cold-blooded and money-oriented, but I keep screwing it up.
Jim Butcher
A succubus on the set. Strike that, the health-conscious kid sister made it two… succubuses. Succubusees? Succubi? Stupid Latin correspondence course.
Jim Butcher
I realized then what had happened.She had turned us--all of us, except for Mouse--into great, gaunt, long-legged hounds.Wonderful!" Lea said, pirouetting upon one toe, laughing. "Come, children!" And she leapt off into the jungle, nimble and swift as a doe.A bunch of us dogs stood around for a moment, just sort of staring at one another..
Jim Butcher
I love being a wizard. Every day is like Disneyland.
Jim Butcher
Beside me, Molly rolled her shoulders in a few jerky motions and pushed at her hair in fitful little gestures. She tugged at her well-tattered skirts, and grimaced at her boots. "Can you see if there’s any mud on them?" I paused to consider her for a second. Then I said, "You have two tattoos showing right now, and you probably used a fake ID to get them. Your piercings would set off any metal detector worth the name, and you’re featuring them in parts of your anatomy your parents wish you didn’t yet realize you had. You’re dressed like Frankenhooker, and your hair has been dyed colors I previously thought existed only in cotton candy.” I turned to face the door again. “I wouldn’t waste time worrying about a little mud on the boots.
Jim Butcher
- Did you really save the world ?...- Mostly I was saving my own ass. Just happend that the world was in the same spot.
Jim Butcher
You're such a cynic," Molly said."I think cynics are playful and cute.
Jim Butcher
I'm so pretty, it's hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.
Jim Butcher
Hell's bells, irony blows.
Jim Butcher
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.
Jim Butcher
I'm amazing and studly, but I have limits.
Jim Butcher
In the action business, when you don't want to say you ran like a mouse, you call it 'taking cover.' It's more heroic.
Jim Butcher
If I was on the road to Hell, at least I was going in style.
Jim Butcher
It came charging toward me, several hundred pounds of angry-looking monster, and I did the only thing any reasonable wizard could have done.I turned around and ran like hell.
Jim Butcher
How long have you been a Wiccan?''A what?''A pagan. A witch.''I'm not a witch,' I said, glancing out the door. 'I'm a wizard.'Sanya frowned. 'What is the difference?''Wizard has a Z'He looked at me blankly.'No one appreciates me.' I muttered.
Jim Butcher
You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!
Jim Butcher
Murphy hung up and I said, to the still-open line, "Hey, if you've got someone watching my place, could you call the cops if anyone tries to steal my Star Wars poster? It's an original."Then I vindictively hung up on the FBI. It made my inner child happy.
Jim Butcher
Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells.
Jim Butcher
I let out a battle cry. Sure, a lot of people might have mistaken it for a sudden yelp of unmanly fear, but trust me. It was a battle cry.
Jim Butcher
Harry," Bob drawled, his eye lights flickering smugly, "what you know about women, I could juggle.
Jim Butcher
I don't know about your true form, but the weight of your ego sure is pushing the crust of the earth toward the breaking point.
Jim Butcher
I'd made the vampire cry. Great. I felt like a real superhero. Harry Dresden, breaker of monsters' hearts.
Jim Butcher