Top 500 Jim Butcher Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “It gets sort of Zen after a while,” Butters said brightly. “Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is a jar.”

— Jim Butcher

352. “Children have their own kind of power. When you’re teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be. More understanding, more patient, more capable, more wise.”

— Jim Butcher

353. “A tumbleweed went rolling by in the street. I’m not even kidding. An actual, literal tumbleweed. Man, Oklahoma.”

— Jim Butcher

354. “Everything’s mine, Francis,” she replied in a merry tone. “The only question is whether or not it knows it is yet.”

— Jim Butcher

355. “As a race, we’re an enormous bunch of idiots. We’re more than capable of ignoring facts if the conclusions they lead to make us too uncomfortable. Or afraid.”

— Jim Butcher

356. “I shall most likely kill you on the morrow.”

— Jim Butcher

357. “See, that’s the tragedy of the human condition. No one wants to be corrupted by power when they set out to get it. They have good, even noble reasons for doing whatever it is they do. They don’t want to misuse it, they don’t want to abuse it, and they don’t want to become vicious monsters. Good people, decent people, set out to take the high road, to pick up power without letting it.”

— Jim Butcher

358. “Bite me, faerie fruitcake.”

— Jim Butcher

359. “Could a man’s heart, his soul, perish and yet leave him walking and talking as if alive?”

— Jim Butcher

360. “It was a well-known fact that humans became more addled than usual when running in herds.”

— Jim Butcher

361. “Ohhhh,” Molly said wisely. “Those are fun-time handcuffs, not bad-time handcuffs. I gotcha.”

— Jim Butcher

362. “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

363. “People who ask questions and think about their faith are the last ones to embrace dogma – and the last to abandon their path once they’ve set out on it. I felt fairly sure that the Almighty, whatever name tag He had on at the moment, could handle a few questions from people sincerely looking for answers. Hell, He might even like it.”

— Jim Butcher

364. “You can have everything in the world, but if you don’t have love, none of it means crap,” he said promptly. “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love always forgives, trusts, supports, and endures. Love never fails. When every star in the heavens grows cold, and when silence lies once more on the face of the deep, three things will endure: faith, hope, and love.”

— Jim Butcher

365. “We’re always disappointed when we find out someone else has human limits, the same as we do. It’s stupid for us to feel that way, and we really ought to know better, but that doesn’t seem to slow us down.”

— Jim Butcher

366. “We’ve both got into the blue beetle. He got into the red door, I got into the white one.”

— Jim Butcher

367. “Karrin Murphy led the charge, and Sanya and I tried to keep up. She went through that sea of foes like a little speedboat, her enemies spun and tossed and turned and disoriented in her wake. Sanya and I hacked our way through stunned foes, pushing and chopping with unsophisticated brutality-and that big Russian lunatic just kept laughing the whole time.”

— Jim Butcher

368. “Ignorance is more than bliss, it’s freaking orgasmic ecstacy!”

— Jim Butcher

369. “One more tip, kids. If you had any real talent, the air would practically have been on fire when you got ready to throw down. But you losers don’t have enough magic between you to turn cereal into breakfast.”

— Jim Butcher

370. “Give me passion – and compassion – any day.”

— Jim Butcher

371. “All power is the same. Magic. Physical strength. Economic strength. Political strength. It all serves a single purpose-it gives its possessor a broader spectrum of choices. It creates alternative courses of action.”

— Jim Butcher

372. “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

373. “Woof,” said Billy the Werewolf.”

— Jim Butcher

374. “My laboratory,” I said, experimentally, drawing out each syllable. “Why is it that saying it like that always makes me want to follow it with ‘mwoo-hah-hah-hah-hahhhhhh’?”

— Jim Butcher

375. “I mean, stars and stones. Two million bucks would buy you a lot of ramen.”

— Jim Butcher

376. “Oh, I forgot to mention it: My brother is the kind of man whom women stalk. In cooperative packs.”

— Jim Butcher

377. “It doesn’t take much power to hurt someone,” she said. “It’s far easier than healing the damage.”

— Jim Butcher

378. “Scars – the graffiti of violence. – Harry Dresden.”

— Jim Butcher

379. “Sometimes, Hoss,” he said very gently, “you lose. Sometimes the darkness takes everyone. Sometimes the monster escapes to kill again another day.” He shook his head and looked down. “Sometimes, Hoss, the innocent little ones are murdered. And there’s not one goddamned thing you can do about it.”

— Jim Butcher

380. “The Shroud was old, and regarded as special, and people believed in it. That could be enough to give it a kind of power, all by itself.”

— Jim Butcher

381. “Vanity, thy name is vampire.”

— Jim Butcher

382. “Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries.”

— Jim Butcher

383. “The next time you interfere with me, more than smoke will interfere with you.”

— Jim Butcher

384. “I stretched out my hand, adrenaline and pain giving me plenty of fuel for the magic, and called, ‘Ventas servitas!’ Wind leapt out in a sudden spurt, seizing the Unraveling and tearing it from Aurora’s fingers, sending it spinning through the air toward me. I caught it, stuck my tongue out at Aurora, yelled, ‘Meep, meep!’ and ran like hell.”

— Jim Butcher

385. “When kind men grow angry, things are about to change.”

— Jim Butcher

386. “Just like credit card companies, or those student loan people. Now there’s evil for you.”

— Jim Butcher

387. “Bikers don’t wear all that leather around simply for the fashion value or possible felony assaults. It’s handy for keeping the highway from ripping the skin from your flesh should you wind up losing control of the bike and sliding along the asphalt for a while.”

— Jim Butcher

388. “I listened. Listening isn’t hard to do. No one has practice at it, nowadays, but you can train yourself to pay attention to your senses if you work at it long enough.”

— Jim Butcher

389. “It’s all right to be afraid. You just don’t let it stop you from doing your job.”

— Jim Butcher

390. “I slammed the doors open a little harder than I needed to, stalked out to the Blue Beetle, and drove away with all the raging power the ancient four-cylinder engine should muster. Behold the angry wizard puttputt-putting away.”

— Jim Butcher

391. “Rowl was not prepared to tolerate incompetence where his personal human was concerned. He had just gotten her properly trained.”

— Jim Butcher

392. “That’s so typical. You won’t steal a baby, but you’re too lazy to conjugate.”

— Jim Butcher

393. “Fear is a funny thing. In the right light, even tiny and insignificant fears can suddenly grow, swelling up to monstrous proportions.”

— Jim Butcher

394. “I like to think of it less as embezzling and more as an involuntary goodwill contribution.”

— Jim Butcher

395. “A man’s magic demonstrates what sort of person he is, what is held most deeply inside of him. There is no truer gauge of a man’s character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power. I was not a murderer. I was not like Victor Sells. I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. I was a wizard. Wizards control their power. They don’t let it control them. And wizards don’t use magic to kill people. They use it to discover, to protect, to mend, to help. Not to destroy.”

— Jim Butcher

396. “It wasn’t until later that I would realize that I was babbling a chant of “Ubriacha, ubrius, ubrium,” to the Peanuts theme music.”

— Jim Butcher

397. “I’m not exactly a useless cream puff.”

— Jim Butcher

398. “Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.”

— Jim Butcher

399. “Time to start doing,” I whispered.”

— Jim Butcher

400. “Harry Dresden Taxidermy. If you snuff it, we’ll stuff it.”

— Jim Butcher