Top 500 Jim Butcher Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Don’t call me a dinosaur. It isn’t fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

255. “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

256. “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

257. “Lightning struck, a hawk cried in fury, and then a goddamned grizzly bear fell out of the night sky and onto Ethniu’s head. Don’t care how Titanic you are. No one expects an orbital-drop grizzly.”

— Jim Butcher

258. “Because Thomas is too pretty to die. And because I’m too stubborn to die. And most of all because tomorrow is Oktoberfest, Butters, and polka will never die.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

260. “I remember very little of my father, but one thing I do remember is him telling me always to be polite. It costs you nothing but breath, and can buy you as much as your life.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

263. “Plan B,” I said. “Okay, right. We need a plan B. If we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.” Susan let out a puff of laughter, and then I turned to her, my eyes alight. “We have a great big truck,” Susan said. “Then why didn’t you list that among our assets?” I said, in a bad British accent. “Go!” Susan vanished back down the.”

— Jim Butcher

264. “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

265. “Names are unique sounds and cadences of words that are attached to one specific individual-sort of like a kind of theme music.”

— Jim Butcher

266. “Behold the angry wizard puttputt-putting away. My.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

268. “If I lived through the next day or so, I needed to start keeping track of where these jokers liked to get their bloodthirsty freak on. It might give me an edge someday. Or at least a list of places that could use a nice burning down. I hadn’t burned down a building in ages.”

— Jim Butcher

269. “There are moments in your life that, when you look back at them, you realize were perfect. A hundred million things had to happen, to all come together at the same time, for such moments to come into existence – so many things that it beggars imagination to think that they could possibly have happened by random chance. This was one of them.”

— Jim Butcher

270. “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

271. “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

272. “You don’t take your cat with you to go bird shopping. Not because the cat isn’t polite, but because he’s a cat.”

— Jim Butcher

273. “I hope you’re one of the good guys, Mr. Dresden. We really need a good guy. I.”

— Jim Butcher

274. “What one deserves and what one experiences are seldom congruent.”

— Jim Butcher

275. “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

— Jim Butcher

276. “I died. I died and someone made a clerical error and I am in Heaven.”

— Jim Butcher

277. “Love is another kind of power, which shouldn’t surprise you. Magic comes from emotions, among other things.”

— Jim Butcher

278. “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

279. “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

280. “I’ve never lost a duel to the death. Not one.”

— Jim Butcher

281. “She held up her hand, palm up – another one of those gestures, their meanings forgotten by everyone except for long-term wackjobs like Dresden.”

— Jim Butcher

282. “You never get a straight answer from captains. You should know that by now.”

— Jim Butcher

283. “Hell’s bells, irony blows.”

— Jim Butcher

284. “He shook his head. “Love killed the dinosaurs, man.”

— Jim Butcher

285. “Being a wizard gives you more power than most, but it doesn’t change your heart. We’re all human. We’re all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.”

— Jim Butcher

286. “I know. It makes my head hurt too.”

— Jim Butcher

287. “A technicality I’m prepared to hide wildly behind.”

— Jim Butcher

288. “Ease off the martyr throttle.”

— Jim Butcher

289. “There is no truer gauge of a man’s character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power.”

— Jim Butcher

290. “It isn’t about being fair and equal. It’s about the difference between right and wrong.” He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. “And this was wrong.”

— Jim Butcher

291. “Fighting is never good. But sometimes necessary.”

— Jim Butcher

292. “Three blind men were shown an elephant. They touched it with their hands to determine what the creature was. The first man felt the trunk, and claimed that an elephant was like a snake. The second man touched its leg and claimed that an elephant was like a tree. The third man touched its tail, and claimed that the elephant was like a slender rope.”

— Jim Butcher

293. “Everyone,” she said, “thinks that hate and love are somehow opposite forces. They are not. They are the same force, facing opposite directions.” She glanced aside at me. “Love is a fire, my Knight. Love turned the wrong way has killed as many as hate. Reason, young wizard, is the opposite of hate, not love.”

— Jim Butcher

294. “Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous.”

— Jim Butcher

295. “My head was throbbing, and my hands were shaking, but I went down the ladder to my workroom – and started figuring out how to rip someone’s heart out of his chest from fifty miles away. Who says I never do anything fun on a Friday night?”

— Jim Butcher

296. “He gave me an inscrutable look that said maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. Mister was a cat, and cats generally considered it the obligation of the universe to provide shelter, sustenance, and amusement as required. I think Mister considered it beneath his dignity to plan for the future.”

— Jim Butcher

297. “Here had lived someone else who knew that the only thing waiting at home was a sense of loneliness. Sometimes it is comforting. Most often, it isn’t.”

— Jim Butcher

298. “A pure heart and mind only takes you so far – sooner or later the hormones have their say, too.”

— Jim Butcher

299. “So there I was being strangled by a ranting, half-naked madman in the middle of the woods, with a she-werewolf dangling from a rope snare somewhere nearby.”

— Jim Butcher

300. “Does it hurt to be as suave as you, boss?” “It’s agonizing.” “Looks it.”

— Jim Butcher