Top 500 Jim Butcher Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Woof,” said Billy the Werewolf.”

— Jim Butcher

402. “See, here’s the thing. Morgan was right: you can’t win them all. But that doesn’t mean that you give up. Not ever. Morgan never said that part – he was too busy living it.”

— Jim Butcher

403. “I am pure of heart and mind,” I told her. “I cannot be corrupted.”

— Jim Butcher

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Jim Butcher

407. “Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought.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. Try and convict me if I’m a bad person for thinking so. I enjoy treating a woman like a lady, opening doors for her, paying for shared meals, giving flowers–all that sort of thing.”

— Jim Butcher

408. “Bite me, faerie fruitcake.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

410. “Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought.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

411. “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

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

— Jim Butcher

413. “Chili dogs, funnel cakes, fried bread, majorly greasy pizza, candy apples, ye gods. Evil food smells amazing – which is either proof that there is a Satan or some equivalent out there, or that the Almighty doesn’t actually want everyone to eat organic tofu all the time. I can’t decide.”

— Jim Butcher

414. “It was worse than murder. It was twisted, wretched perversion, as though someone had bludgeoned another person to death with a Botticelli, turned something of beauty to an act of utter destruction.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

416. “Pretty please. With sugar.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

418. “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

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

— Jim Butcher

420. “It was like a fire in my thoughts, my concentration, burning ever more brightly, more pure, refining my anger, my hate, into something steel-hard, steel-sharp. I could feel it burning, and reached for it eagerly, shoving the pain inside to fuel my incandescent anger.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

422. “You don’t gain knowledge without a little pain.”

— Jim Butcher

423. “Sometimes you don’t know the most important things,” Tavi said. “You believe them.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

425. “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

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

— Jim Butcher

427. “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

428. “Intentions count for far less than the consequences of the actions born from them.”

— Jim Butcher

429. “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

430. “One rather thick volume was titled Means of Execution Through the Ages, and was placed with an elegant balance of nonchalance and availability at the eye level of anyone entering the room. As threats went, it was nearly subliminal – and perhaps it was placed there for that very reason.”

— Jim Butcher

431. “Maybe this is what it feels like for civilians when they see cops doing some of the dirty work. A lot of times they don’t understand what’s happening. They see something they don’t like and it upsets them – because they don’t have the full story, aren’t personally facing the problem, and don’t know how much worse the alternative could be.”

— Jim Butcher

432. “The only people who never hurt are dead.”

— Jim Butcher

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

— Jim Butcher

434. “Every potion has eight parts. One part is a base liquid to hold the others and provide a medium for mixing. Five parts are symbolically linked to each of the five senses. One is similarly linked to the mind, and another to the spirit. The basic ingredient to the stimulant potion was coffee, while the base for the scent-masking potion was water. I got them both to boiling.”

— Jim Butcher

435. “Hell’s Bells-Harry Dresden.”

— Jim Butcher

436. “I don’t have anything against God. Far from it. But I don’t understand Him. And I don’t trust a lot of the people that go around claiming that they’re working in His best interests. Faeries and vampires and whatnot – those I can fathom. Even demons. Sometimes, even the Fallen. I can understand why they do what they do. 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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “In for a sheep, in for a gargant.”

— Jim Butcher

440. “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

441. “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

442. “I’d been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it’s sort of depressing, thinking how many times I’d been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse.”

— Jim Butcher

443. “The Denarians want to disrupt civilization, and with the Archive under their control, they could do it. Maybe they’d use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they’d crash the world economy. Maybe they’d turn every program on television into one of those reality shows.” “That’s mostly done already, Harry.”

— Jim Butcher

444. “He had hard, steady eyes, and all the comforting, reassuring charm of a dental drill. – Harry Dresden describing Morgan.”

— Jim Butcher

445. “You’ve got it backward, Harry,” he said. “You are a soul. You have a body.”

— Jim Butcher

446. “I parked in front of the Field Museum under a NO PARKING sign. There were a couple of actual spots I could have used, but the drive was even closer. Besides, I found it aesthetically satisfying to defy municipal code.”

— Jim Butcher

447. “You’re dead, son. Cheer is contraindicated.”

— Jim Butcher

448. “Let me be clear that I never offered House Astor an insult... Nor did I insult Reginald. I simply described him in accurate terms. If he finds himself insulted by the truth, it’s hardly my concern.”

— Jim Butcher

449. “You’d think as long as I was gambling with my soul, I would have thought to get Mab to throw in fifty bucks an hour plus expenses.”

— Jim Butcher

450. “Come with me if you want to live.”

— Jim Butcher