Top 500 Jim Butcher Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Words have a power every bit as terrible and beautiful as magic.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

354. “I now had two handy shafts of wood with jagged, pointy ends. I stepped between Inari and the nearest vampire and passed her one broken half of the rod. “Here,” I said. “If you get the chance, make like Buffy.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

356. “Imagine Smaug’s treasure hoard. Now imagine Smaug with crippling levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fanatic good taste.”

— Jim Butcher

357. “I hear that they make disinfectants that don’t hurt these days. But Charity used iodine.”

— Jim Butcher

358. “Because nothing says flattery like a gun to the head.”

— Jim Butcher

359. “We’re all so damned fragile.”

— Jim Butcher

360. “Fear and anger always come hand in hand. Anger is my hiding place from fear, my shield and my sword against it.”

— Jim Butcher

361. “The freaking Leanansidhe, deputy of Her Wickedness, with her Nietzsche and Darwin Were Sentimental Pansies outlook on life.”

— Jim Butcher

362. “How are you going to talk to someone who has no idea?” Grimm said, nodding. “How can you explain something you can’t find words for? How can you get someone else to understand something for which they have no frame of reference?”

— Jim Butcher

363. “I could buy that she would murder me in a fit of rage, poison me out of flaming jealousy, or bomb my car out of sheer, stubborn pique. But she would never do it and feel nothing.”

— Jim Butcher

364. “I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.”

— Jim Butcher

365. “I had to smile at the man. I mean, you have to smile at idiots and children.”

— Jim Butcher

366. “In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game.”

— Jim Butcher

367. “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

368. “You know, I believe it is possible to reference something other than Star Wars, boss.” I narrowed my eyes in Muppetly wisdom. “That is why you fail.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

370. “Vanity, thy name is vampire.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

372. “I checked my gear, my pockets, my shoelaces, and realized that I had crossed the line between making sure I was ready and trying to postpone the inevitable.”

— Jim Butcher

373. “Here’s where I ask why don’t you spend your time doing something safer and more boring. Like maybe administering suppositories to rabid gorillas.”

— Jim Butcher

374. “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

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

377. “Bite me, faerie fruitcake.”

— Jim Butcher

378. “I just stood there staring, because while I’ve seen a lot of weird things, I hadn’t ever seen that.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

381. “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

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

— Jim Butcher

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

388. “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

389. “Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

391. “I’m so pretty, it’s hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.”

— Jim Butcher

392. “An honest man is a rare treasure.”

— Jim Butcher

393. “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

394. “The worst lies are almost always silence – or else truth, tainted with just enough deception to rot it to the core.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

397. “She is my child,” Charity objected. “She was,” Forthill corrected her, “if only for a time. Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

399. “What can I say? I put the ‘ick’ in ‘magic’.”

— Jim Butcher

400. “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