Jim Butcher

"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: Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face."

"Harry Dresden: Santa is a much bigger and more powerful faery than Toot, and I don't know his true name anyway. You'd never see me trying to nab Saint Nick in a magic circle even if I did. I don't think anyone has stones that big."

"Harry Dresden: Tequila? Are you sure on that one? I thought the base for a love potion was supposed to be champagne. Bob: Champagne, tequila, what's the difference, so long as it'll lower her inhibitions? Harry Dresden: Uh, I'm thinking it's going to get us a, um, sleazier result."

"Harry Dresden: I'd made the vampire cry. Great. I felt like a real superhero. Harry Dresden, breaker of monsters' hearts."

"Harry Dresden: The world is getting weirder. Darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster, and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconers. The center cannot hold. But in my corner of the country, I'm trying to nail things down. I don't want to live in Victor's jungle, even if it did eventually devour him. I don't want to live in a world where the strong rule and the weak cower. I'd rather make a place where things are a little quieter. Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don't come swooping out to snatch children from their cradles. Where vampires respect the limits, and where the faeries mind their p's and q's. My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call. I'm in the book."

"Harry Dresden: In McAnally's pub and grill, there aren't any service people. According to Mac, if you can't get up and walk over to pick up your own order, you don't need to be there at all."

"Harry Dresden: Sometimes I hate having a conscience, and a stupidly thorough sense of honor."

"Harry Dresden: Maybe it wasn't anything I'd done. Maybe the monsters had gone on strike. Yeah right."

"Karrin Murphy: Yes, Your honor, your victim was killed by a werewolf."

"Harry Dresden: It's a place with a history, the neighbors are quiet, and my rent is cheap—though less so than it was before the demon thrashed my place."

"Harry Dresden: Don't mess with a wizard when he's wizarding!"

"Michael Carpenter: I still can’t believe, that you came to the Vampires’ Masquerade Ball dressed as a vampire. Harry Dresden: Not only that, but a cheesy vampire."

"Michael Carpenter: Lord, we walk into darkness now. Our enemies will surround us. Please help to make us strong enough to do what needs to be done. Amen."

"Bob 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."

"Harry Dresden: As I pulled into the parking lot, I reflected that odds were that not a lot of clandestine meetings involving mystical assassination, theft of arcane power, and the balance of power in the realms of the supernatural had taken place in a Wal-Mart Super Center. But then again, maybe they had. Hell, for all I knew, the Mole Men used the changing rooms as a place to discuss plans for world domination with the Psychic Jellyfish from Planet X and the Disembodied Brains-in-a-Jar from the Klaatuu Nebula. I know I wouldn’t have looked for them there."

"Harry Dresden: Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionised the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this an escalator.""

"Harry Dresden: The noise was deafening, and no one could have heard me anyway as I let out my own battle cry, which I figured was worth a shot. What the hell. "I don't believe in faeries!""

"Harry Dresden: Some things just aren't meant to go together. Things like oil and water. Orange juice and toothpaste. Wizards and television."

"Harry Dresden: I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it."

"Johnny Marcone: Do you know what I think? Harry Dresden: You think we should shoot Nicodemus in the back at the first opportunity and let Michael dismember him. Marcone: Yes. I drew my gun. Harry Dresden: Okay."

"Michael Carpenter My faith protects me. My Kevlar helps."

"Harry Dresden: The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault."

"Harry Dresden: There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard. It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed. By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder. The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire's crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil. The vampire gasped and writhed a little more. The timer popped out of the turkey. Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain't something you see twice. "For my next trick," I panted into the startled silence, "anvils.""

"Harry Dresden: It’s not my fault all women like motorcycles, Murph. They’re basically huge vibrators. With wheels."

"Harry Dresden: For future reference, I was sort of hoping for a suggestion that didn't sound like it came from that Bolshevik Muppet with all the dynamite."

"Thomas Raith: An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo."

"Karrin Murphy: I'm pretty sure there's no Nobel prize for pornography."

"Jared Kincaid: Thus interrupting it. Thus kablowie, thus death."

"Harry Dresden: Kincaid! Bolshevik Muppet!"

"Harry Dresden: On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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.""

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

"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.""

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

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

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

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

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

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