Novelists From The United States

"Thomas Raith: Harry's a wizard. A genuine, honest-to-good-ness wizard. He's Gandalf on crack and an IV of Red Bull, with a big leather coat and a .44 revolver in his pocket. He'll spit in the eye of gods and demons alike if he thinks it needs to be done, and to hell with the consequences-and yet somehow my little brother manages to remain a decent human being."

"Harry Dresden: Discussing a problem with yourself is almost never a good way to secure a divergent viewpoint."

"Harry Dresden: Death is only frightening from the near side."

"Harry Dresden: 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."

"Sanya, Knight of the Cross: Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka."

"Sanya, Knight of the Cross: There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity."

"Harry Dresden: Paranoia is a survival trait when you run in my circles. It gives you something to do in your spare time, coming up with solutions to ridiculous problems that aren't ever going to happen. Except when one of them does, at which point you feel way too vindicated."

"Queen Mab: For love men will mutilate themselves and murder rivals. For love will even a peaceful man go to war. For Love, man will destroy himself, and do so willingly."

"Harry Dresden: But there were some things I believed in. Some things I had faith in. And faith isn’t about perfect attendance to services, or how much money you put on the little plate. It isn’t about going skyclad to the Holy Rites, or meditating each day upon the divine. Faith is about what you do. It’s about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It’s about making sacrifices for the good of others—even when there’s not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are."

"Harry Dresden: As a whole, people suck, but a person can be extraordinary."

"Warden Chandler: PS--Why, yes, I can in fact capitalize any words I desire. The language is English. I am English. Therefore mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen."

"Susan Rodriguez: Harry, have you ever heard of the paperless office? Harry Dresden: Yeah. It's like Bigfoot. Someone says he knows someone who saw him, but you don't ever actually see him yourself."

"Harry Dresden: Pretty sure that Roman Catholic priests don't have peeps. Too trendy and ephemeral. Like automobiles. And the printing press."

"Harry Dresden: The freaking Council never does anything quickly, and I had a bad feeling that tempus was fugiting furiously."

"Harry Dresden: Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over--a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it's binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?"

"Harry Dresden: Hers was a beauty so pure that it was nearly painful to behold--Athena heading out on a Friday night."

"Molly Carpenter: Wrote the Laws of Magic, founded the White Council, was custodian of one of the Swords and established a stronghold for the Council, too. He must have been something else. Harry Dresden: He must have been a real bastard. Guys who get their name splashed all over history and folklore don't tend to be Boy Scout troop leaders. Molly Carpenter: You're such a cynic. Harry Dresden: I think cynics are playful and cute."

"Harry Dresden: You don't explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor."

"Listens-To-Wind "Injun Joe": There is world that should be, and the world that is. We live in one. Ebenezer: And must create the other, if it is ever to be."

"Listens-To-Wind "Injun Joe": Not gonna bind ya or break ya, old spirit. Just gonna kick your ass up between your ears."

"Harry Dresden: This is Waldo Butters, and his geek penis is longer and harder than all of ours put together."

"Harry Dresden: Even a broken clock gets it right occasionally."

"Harry Dresden: 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 the darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear. Get a good ways out from civilization-say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake-and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. 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. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts. And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things."

"Harry Dresden: The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but it’s better than most people have managed to come up with. And all my stuff is there."

"When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files."

"Harry Dresden: You’re in America now. Our idea of diplomacy is showing up with a gun in one hand and a sandwich in the other and asking which you’d prefer. Anastasia Luccio: Did you bring a sandwich? Harry Dresden: What do I look like, Kissinger?"

"Harry Dresden: I can't believe I'm about to say this. So think real careful about where this is coming from: Have you people ever considered talking when you've got a problem?"

"Harry Dresden: That's Doctor Smart-ass. I didn't spend eight years in insult college to be called Mister."

"Harry Dresden: You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!"

"Marcone: In my judgment, my buildings are less likely to burn to the ground during one of your visits if you are disoriented from being treated like a sultan."

"Harry Dresden: 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. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another."

"Harry Dresden: Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it."

"Harry Dresden: We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind-graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens."

"Harry Dresden: Tonight you will be visited by three spirits, the ghosts of indictment past, present and future. They will teach you the true meaning of "you are still a scumbag criminal.""

"Harry Dresden: We're all human. We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain."

"Harry Dresden: Murphy had found a spot on the street, which made me wonder if she didn't have some kind of magical talent after all. Only some kind of precognitive ESP could have gotten us a parking space on the street, in the shadow of a building, with both of us in sight of the apartment building's entrance."

"Harry Dresden: A little humiliation and ego deflation, now and then, is good for apprentices. Mine sighed miserably."

"Harry Dresden: Keep in mind that this appears in the same book of the Bible that approves the death sentence for a child who curses his parents, owners of oxen who injure someone through the owner's negligence, anybody who works or kindles a fire on Sunday, and anyone who has sex with an animal."

"Harry Dresden: Many things are not as they seem: The worst things in life never are."

"Harry Dresden: I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching - they are your family."

"Harry Dresden: You can never tell how someone is going to handle power — not until you hand it to them and see what they do with it."

"Harry Dresden: Dresden Taxidermy. You snuff it, we'll stuff it."

"Harry Dresden: Blood leaves no stain on a Warden's cloak."

"Malcolm Dresden: Son. Everyone dies alone. That's what it is. It's a door. It's one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone." His fingers squeezed me tight. "But it doesn't mean you've got to be alone before you go through the door. And believe me, you aren't alone on the other side.""

"Carlos Ramirez: Everyone else who lets me ride on their dinosaur calls me Carlos."

"Quintus Cassius: I have dreamed of this night, boy. [he purred, and gently stroked the side of my face with the baseball bat.] Quintus Cassius: In my day, we would say that revenge is sweet. But times have changed. How do you say...? "Payback is a bitch.""

"Waldo Butters: Screw up my life? [He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan] Waldo Butters: I’m a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow. [He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said] Waldo Butters: Do your worst."

"Harry Dresden: Took cover. In the action business, when you don't want to say you ran like a mouse, you call it 'taking cover.' It's more heroic."

"Harry Dresden/Waldo Butters: Polka will never die!"

"Harry Dresden: 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."