Top 500 Jim Butcher Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Compartmentalize and conquer.”

— Jim Butcher

153. “I’d fallen victim to one of the other classic blunders, along with not getting involved in a land war in Asia and never going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line.”

— Jim Butcher

154. “Just because you start out as one thing, it doesn’t mean you can’t grow into something else.”

— Jim Butcher

155. “The best thing about my faerie godmother is that the creepy just keeps on coming.”

— Jim Butcher

156. “I hate dreams like this,” I said. “There’s no plot – just random weird things happening. I get enough of that when I’m awake.”

— Jim Butcher

157. “It is going to work,” I told her, keeping my tone confident. “We’ll breeze right in. The Rack will be with us.” Justine glanced at me with an arched eyebrow. “The Rack?” “The Rack is more than just boobs, Justine,” I told her soberly. “It’s an energy field created by all living boobs. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

— Jim Butcher

158. “His mind is strange,” came Varg’s rumbling voice, “but capable.”

— Jim Butcher

159. “Not gonna bind ya or break ya, old spirit. Just gonna kick your ass up between your ears.”

— Jim Butcher

160. “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

161. “Man sees faces. Sees skin. Flags. Membership lists. Files. God sees hearts.”

— Jim Butcher

162. “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.”

— Jim Butcher

163. “I did absolutely nothing. Carefully.”

— Jim Butcher

164. “It gets too hot in there after a long test,” he told Ehren. “The air gets all squishy.” “It’s called humidity, Tavi,” Ehren said. “I haven’t slept in almost two days. It’s squishy.”

— Jim Butcher

165. “Chocolate fends off all kinds of nasty stuff. And if you get hungry while warding off evil, you have a snack. It’s multipurpose equipment.”

— Jim Butcher

166. “You are a rare kind of crazy, man.”

— Jim Butcher

167. “No story that juicy was going to stay secret for long.”

— Jim Butcher

168. “When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.”

— Jim Butcher

169. “Night wasn’t so much falling as sharpening its claws.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

171. “Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy.”

— Jim Butcher

172. “There’s a fine line between audacity and idiocy.”

— Jim Butcher

173. “A house doesn’t make a home. When the place has got history, family, emotions, worries, joys worked into the wood, that’s when it gets a solid threshold.”

— Jim Butcher

174. “Nothing is truly safe in this world – and that being the case, why worry about threats that have not yet appeared? Far wiser to make what preparations one could, face trouble as it arose, and be happy in the meantime.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

176. “People love dogs. You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story.”

— Jim Butcher

177. “So many terrible things are done for love,” Mab’s voice said. “For love will men mutilate themselves and murder rivals. For love will even a peaceful man go to war. For love, man will destroy himself, and that right willingly.”

— Jim Butcher

178. “Kids. You gotta love them. I adore children. A little salt, a squeeze of lemon – perfect.”

— Jim Butcher

179. “Even in winter, the cold isn’t always bitter, and not every day is cruel.”

— Jim Butcher

180. “What is teaching but the art of planting and nurturing power?” Lea replied. “Mortals prattle on about lonely impulses of delight and the gift of knowledge, and think that teaching is a trade like metalsmithing or healing or telling lies on television. It is not. It is the dissemination of power unto a new generation and nothing less. For her, as for you, lessons demand real risk in order to attain their true rewards.”

— Jim Butcher

181. “A duel would mean a fair fight, and I hate fair fights. In the words of a murderous Faerie Queen, they’re too easy to lose. Of.”

— Jim Butcher

182. “Living was a dangerous past-time, and often quite painful – but there was also such joy in living, such beauty, things that one would otherwise never see, never experience, never know. The risk of pain and loss was a part of living.”

— Jim Butcher

183. “Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don’t.”

— Jim Butcher

184. “More than anything, I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. I wanted to be not.”

— Jim Butcher

185. “There’re things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times.”

— Jim Butcher

186. “My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under “Wizards.” Believe it or not, I’m the only one there.”

— Jim Butcher

187. “Life is precious, fragile, fleeting – and Murphy’s life was one of my favorites.”

— Jim Butcher

188. “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

189. “I put on the boots and kicked some monster ass.”

— Jim Butcher

190. “When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.”

— Jim Butcher

191. “One can have only as much preparation as he has foresight.”

— Jim Butcher

192. “I like her,” Sanya rumbled in his deep, half-swallowed accent. “She is so tiny and fierce. I don’t suppose she knows how to – ” “Sanya,” Michael said, his voice very firm. “We have talked about this.” The dark-skinned Russian sighed and shrugged. “It could not hurt to ask.” “Sanya.” He lifted both hands in a gesture of surrender, grinning, and fell silent. The.”

— Jim Butcher

193. “Trite but true – you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. People change. The world changes. And sooner or later you lose people you care about. If you don’t mind some advice from someone who doesn’t know much about families, I can tell you this: Don’t take yours for granted. It might feel like all of them will always be there. But they won’t.” She.”

— Jim Butcher

194. “They say civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism. Chicago stood waiting for the first tearing sound.”

— Jim Butcher

195. “The Black Hole?” Grey asked, incredulously. “Nobody quotes The Black Hole, Dresden. Nobody even remembers that one.” “Hogwash. Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, and Roddy McDowall all in the same movie? Immortality.”

— Jim Butcher

196. “The human mind isn’t a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn’t make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.”

— Jim Butcher

197. “We all have our demons.”

— Jim Butcher

198. “False gods!” she cried, her blue eyes blazing as she stared at the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night. “Pretenders! Usurpers of truth! Destroyers of faith, of families, of lives, of children! For your crimes against the Mayans, against the peoples of the world, now will you answer! Your time has come! Face judgment Almighty!”

— Jim Butcher

199. “You suck. You suck diseased moose wang, Marcone.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher