Quotes from Jim Butcher

That's the thing about knowledge, though. The more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn.

Monsters are born of pain and grief and loss and anger. Your heart is full of them.

If a White Court vampire wants to feed off a human, all she really has to do is crook her finger, and he comes running. There isn't any ominous music. Nobody sparkles. As far as anyone looking on is concerned, a girl winks at a boy and goes off somewhere to make out. Happens every day. They don't get

There are humans on a ship of wood with tall trees on it. As its sole purpose is to transport me, I have declared it mine, and my scent is upon it.

There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don't let anyone tell you any different.

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.

People who are scared need to laugh, and the scarier things are, the more they need it.

when I asked myself who I could trust, I came up with a damned short list. You're it.

You need some time in a quiet place, boss. Unkink your brain's do. Mellow your vibe." "Thank you, Doctor Fraud

His mind is strange," came Varg's rumbling voice, "but capable.

Nice father figure. Him and Bill Cosby.

As a rule, people aren't good at handling power. And the second you think you're better at controlling your power than anyone else, you've already taken the first step.

But I'd never been very good at expressing myself verbally.

She . . . is worried that her daughter is a very young person moving in a world that rewards inexperience with pain.

The fastest way for us to help make him into a monster is to look at him like he is one.

Mortimer Lindquist seemed to have finally given in to the inevitable. I'd seen him with a bad toupee, and with an even worse comb-over, but this was the first time I'd seen him sporting a full-on Charles Xavier.

Don't borrow trouble.

Harry waxes poetic about magic. He'll go on and on about how it comes from your feelings, and how it's a deep statement about the nature of your soul, and then he'll whip out some kind of half-divine, half-insane philosophy he's cobbled together from the words of saints and comic books about the importance of handling power responsibly.

Now, courage ain't everything. But you build everything else on it." He

another pang of half-remembered days long gone made my chest ache for a second.

Shiro died. There was nothing pretty about it. There was no dignity to it. He'd been brutalized and savagely murdered - and he'd allowed it to happen to him in my place. But when he died, there was a small, contended smile on his face. Maybe the smile of someone who had run his course without wavering from it. Someone who had served something greater than himself. Who had given up his life willingly, if not gladly.

I felt like a collection of complaints and malfunctions

They're nice cages," I responded. "No space around them. Nothing alive. Places like this turn a man into a gerbil. He comes home and scurries inside. Then he stays there until he's forced to go back out to the job he has to work so that he can make the mortgage payments on this gerbil habitat.

All we need is a stuffed animal." He stared at me. "Wh-what did you say?" "A stuffed animal, man!" I roared at him. "Don't mess with a wizard when he's wizarding!