Top 500 Jim Butcher Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “When I’m in turmoil, when I can’t think, when I’m exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It’s just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building.”

— Jim Butcher

202. “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

203. “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 darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear...”

— Jim Butcher

204. “Hers was a beauty so pure that it was nearly painful to behold – Athena heading out on a Friday night.”

— Jim Butcher

205. “I told you long ago that being a real wizard means sacrifice. It means knowing things no one else does,” he said, still growling. “I told you that it meant that you might have to act upon what you knew, and knew to be right, even though the whole world set its hand against you. Or that you might have to do horrible, necessary things. Do you remember that?”

— Jim Butcher

206. “Because a sound tree doesn’t have bad roots, Amara. No enterprise of greatness begins with treachery, with lying to the people who trust and love you.”

— Jim Butcher

207. “Spear and magic helmet,” I said in my best Elmer Fudd voice. “Be vewy, vewy quiet. We’re hunting vampires.”

— Jim Butcher

208. “Knowledge counters fear. It always has.”

— Jim Butcher

209. “All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.”

— Jim Butcher

210. “Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it’s a big part, and sometimes it isn’t, but either way, it’s part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you’re alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed.”

— Jim Butcher

211. “Keep it up, wise guy. I’m always going to be taller than you once you’re lying unconscious on the ground.”

— Jim Butcher

212. “Speed of lightning! Roar of thunder! Fighting all who rob or plunder! Underdog!”

— Jim Butcher

213. “Money is a madness, a delusion-illusion. It’s not made of metal, really. It’s made of time. How much is one’s time worth? If one can convince enough people that one’s time is an invaluable resource, then one has lots and lots of money. That’s why one can spend time – only one can never get a refund.”

— Jim Butcher

214. “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

215. “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

216. “Significance is cumulative – but not always obvious.”

— Jim Butcher

217. “Make ready to repel boarders.”

— Jim Butcher

218. “At the moment I was mad enough to chew up nails and spit out paper clips.”

— Jim Butcher

219. “My gast was pretty well flabbered.”

— Jim Butcher

220. “I brought the Beetle to life with a roar. Well. Not really a roar. A Volkswagen Bug doesn’t roar. But it sort of growled...”

— Jim Butcher

221. “I didn’t follow her right away. She didn’t look back. Stab. Twist. God, I love being a wizard.”

— Jim Butcher

222. “Ah, yes, a savage. Of the famous Chromotonsorial Cahokian Goth tribe.”

— Jim Butcher

223. “If you can’t stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they’re hanging around.”

— Jim Butcher

224. “Sometimes I hate having a conscience, and a stupidly thorough sense of honor.”

— Jim Butcher

225. “They say you can know a man by his enemies, Dresden.” He smiled, and laughter lurked beneath his next words, never quite surfacing. “You defy beings that should cow you into silence. You resist forces that are inevitable for no more reason than that you believe they should be resisted. You bow your head to neither demons nor angels, and you put yourself in harm’s way to defend those who cannot defend themselves.” He nodded slowly. “I think I like you.”

— Jim Butcher

226. “Death isn’t when your body stops working. It’s when there’s no more future. When you can’t see past right now, because you stopped believing in tomorrow.”

— Jim Butcher

227. “The very sound of Creation still echoes throughout the vast darkness: The universe remembers.”

— Jim Butcher

228. “I’ve been a young man. Boobs are near the center of the universe, until you turn twenty-five or so. Which is also when young men’s auto insurance rates go down. This is not a coincidence.”

— Jim Butcher

229. “Polka will never die!” Butters screamed. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Thomas muttered.”

— Jim Butcher

230. “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. Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can’t weave together a spell that you don’t believe in.”

— Jim Butcher

231. “If you let fear start driving some of your decisions, sooner or later, it will drive them all.”

— Jim Butcher

232. “Death is as light as a feather, duty heavier than a spire.”

— Jim Butcher

233. “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.”

— Jim Butcher

234. “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

235. “Lies. Mab cannot change who you are.”

— Jim Butcher

236. “I do business with many people over the course of centuries, and treachery is a bad long-term investment. It simply isn’t good business.”

— Jim Butcher

237. “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.”

— Jim Butcher

238. “Don’t call me a dinosaur. It isn’t fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?”

— Jim Butcher

239. “Bridget blinked once. “Books do not have souls, sir.” “Those who write them do,” Ferus said. “They leave bits and pieces behind them when they lay down the words, some scraps and smears of their essential nature.” He sniffed. “Most untidy, really – but assemble enough scraps and one might have something approaching a whole.” “You believe that the library has a soul,” Bridget said carefully. “I do not believe it, young lady,” Ferus said rather stiffly. “I know it.”

— Jim Butcher

240. “I think that men ought to treat women like something other than weaker men with breasts.”

— Jim Butcher

241. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.”

— Jim Butcher

242. “My own aches and bruises and cuts and wounds pained me, but it was an honest, stretchy pain, something that was healing.”

— Jim Butcher

243. “That’s the true power of a wizard. I know things. Knowledge is power. With power comes responsibility.”

— Jim Butcher

244. “I had time to think, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to.”

— Jim Butcher

245. “The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, standing outside in the cold and staring in at Christmas dinner. Relationships hadn’t ever really worked for me. I think it’s had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.”

— Jim Butcher

246. “No rest for the wicked, Bob, and that means that we can’t slack off either, or they’ll outwork us.”

— Jim Butcher

247. “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

248. “You don’t go walking into the proverbial lion’s den lightly. You start with a good breakfast.”

— Jim Butcher

249. “More than that, though, it gained a definite spiritual chill. Malevolent energy hovered around us, slow and thick like half-frozen honey. There was a gloating, miserly quality to it, bringing to my mind images of old Smaug lying in covetous slumber upon his bed of treasure.”

— Jim Butcher

250. “Butters’s voice turned bitter. “Them or us, choose a side?” “It’s not about taking sides,” Karrin said. “It’s about knowing yourself. About understanding why you make the choices you do. Once you know that, you know where to walk, too.”

— Jim Butcher