Jim Butcher

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Jim Butcher (born October 26, 1971) is an American novelist, most known for his contemporary fantasy book series The Dresden Files. He also writes the Codex Alera series.

Contents

[edit] Sourced

  • 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.

[edit] The Dresden Files

[edit] Storm Front (2000)

  • Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face.
  • 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.
  • "Tequila?" I asked him, skeptically. "Are you sure on that one? I thought the base for a love potion was supposed to be champagne." "Champagne, tequila, what's the difference, so long as it'll lower her inhibitions?" Bob said. "Uh. I'm thinking it's going to get us a, um, sleazier result."
  • I'd made the vampire cry. Great. I felt like a real superhero. Harry Dresden, breaker of monsters' hearts.
  • 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.

[edit] Fool Moon (2001)

  • Don't mess with a wizard when he's wizarding!

[edit] Grave Peril (2001)

  • I still can’t believe, that you came to the Vampires’ Masquerade Ball dressed as a vampire.

[edit] Summer Knight (2002)

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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!"

[edit] Death Masks (2003)

  • I wouldn't burden any decent system of faith by participating in it.

[edit] Blood Rites (2004)

  • 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.
  • 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."
  • I'm pretty sure there's no Nobel prize for pornography.
  • It’s not my fault all women like motorcycles, Murph. They’re basically huge vibrators. With wheels.
  • 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.

[edit] Dead Beat (2005)

  • 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.
  • “Screw up my life?” He stared a me for a second and then said, deadpan, “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, “Do your worst.”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • "I have dreamed of this night, boy," he purred, and gently stroked the side of my face with the baseball bat. "In my day, we would say that revenge is sweet. But times have changed. How do you say? Payback is a bitch."
    • Character: Quintus Cassius, Chapter 36

[edit] Small Favor (2008)

  • You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles!

[edit] Turn Coat (2009)

  • That's Doctor Smart-ass. I didn't spend eight years in insult college to be called Mister.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Narration, Chapter 40
  • Even a broken clock gets it right occasionally.
  • This is Waldo Butters, and his geek penis is longer and harder than all of ours put together.

[edit] The Dresden Files short stories

[edit] Day Off

Originally published in the anthology Blood Lite (October 21, 2008, ISBN 1416567836)

  • He who kills the cheer springs for beer.
  • The next time you interfere with me, more than smoke will interfere with you.
    • Character: "Darth Wannabe"

[edit] Restoration of Faith

"Restoration of Faith"

  • Bridges are a troll's specialty. Whether because of some magic or just because of aptitude, you never get across the bridge without facing the troll. That's life, I guess.

[edit] External links

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