You're dead, son. Cheer is contraindicated.
I love you, Journeyman said to the lift crystal. He kissed it and spread his arms across its surface in an embrace. I love you, you big, beautiful beast. I want you to marry me. I want you to bear my children.
There are many things you have never done, Rowl responded. To be frightened of them is of no use to you.
My faith protects me. My Kevlar helps.
Polka will never die.
We had reached the doors to my suite, which still felt awkward to say, even in my own head. My suite. Guys like me don't have suites. We have lairs.
Attention, shoppers! Discount specials on Harry Dresden's life. Slightly used, no refunds, limit one per customer. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart.
Monsters are born of pain and grief and loss and anger. Your heart is full of them.
Mortimer Lindquist seemed to have finally given in to the inevitable. I'd seen him with a bad toupee, and with an even worse comb-over, but this was the first time I'd seen him sporting a full-on Charles Xavier.
It gets kind of zen after awhile, life is a journey, time is a river, the door is ajar.
I got the sneaking suspicion that the vampire was a couple of Peeps short of an Easter basket.
Truth be told, my head was spinning so much that the car could have been doing interpretive dance in a lilac tutu and I might not have noticed.
You're with me today. I need someone to watch my back. Maybe to help me eat a hot dog later.
Then I drew in a breath, and my renewed will with it, lifted the rod in my right hand, murmured a phrase in a language I didn't know, and blew the tires off his fucking truck.
I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.
Honestly. He sometimes felt that humans simply had to be deliberately obtuse. What was so difficult about understanding civilized and excellently enunciated speech?
And it was all your fault, Harry.
Body or mind, heart or soul, we're all human, and we're supposed to feel pain. You cut yourself off from it at your own risk.
I... drew out the gun I kept at home, a great big old Dirty Harry Callahan number that weighed about seventy-five thousand pounds.
Hebbity bedda, I said, by way of attempting a greeting. My mouth had gone rather numb, and my tongue felt like a lead weight. Jussa hangonna sayke hee. Fix jumped up and down, pointing at me, his voice shrill. He's casting on us!
Laughter, like love, has power to survive the worst things life has to offer. And to do it with style.
I moved my feet in a vague shuffle, and remembered somewhere that when you walked, you moved them alternately. This improved our progress considerably.
My stomach rumbled. Like certain other portions of my anatomy, it had a tendency to become easily sidetracked, and to hell with little details like survival.
It's one of the things that makes us different than they are, Harry. The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs.
Somewhere along the way, their passion had become bottled anger. The anger had fermented into bitter hatred. Then the hatred had fed upon itself, gnawing away at them over years, even decades, until only a shell of cold iron and colder hate remained.
Littlemouse was in danger, doubtless a prisoner, and the humans could not be trusted to handle her rescue with appropriate violence. They might be willing to leave someone alive, and Rowl was not prepared to tolerate incompetence where his personal human was concerned. He had just gotten her properly trained.
The worst lies are almost always silence—or else truth, tainted with just enough deception to rot it to the core.
The energy of night was far different than that of the daylight—not inherently evil, but wilder, more dangerous, more unpredictable.
Paranoid? Probably. But just because you.
If a White Court vampire wants to feed off a human, all she really has to do is crook her finger, and he comes running. There isn't any ominous music. Nobody sparkles. As far as anyone looking on is concerned, a girl winks at a boy and goes off somewhere to make out. Happens every day. They don't get.
I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.
No rest for the wicked, Bob, and that means that we can't slack off either, or they'll outwork us.
It is the prerogative of wizards to be grumpy.
My brief flash of relief and confidence melted away. Good thing it did, too. I'm sure the world would come to an end if I were allowed to feel a sense of relief and well-being for any length of time.
The Legions have a long tradition, boys. You march hard and fast and show up in places where no one expects you—and then you go to work. He grinned. And you do it all carrying a hundred pounds of gear made by whoever did it for the least coin—but every one of those slives gets paid better than you! It's tradition!
There are thousands of names for them, in every culture—mana, psychic energy, totem, juju, chi, bioethereal power, the Force, the soul. It's an incredibly complex system of interweaving energy that influences good old Mother Earth around us, but it all boils down to a fairly simple concept: Shit happens.
There are bad things in the world. There's no getting away from that. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done about them. You can't abandon life just because it's scary, and just because sometimes you get hurt.
There are no words. It was like The Lord of the Rings and All My Children made a baby with the Macho Man Randy Savage and a Whac-A-Mole machine. Butters sputtered.
They're always too strong. There's always more of them, and they're always too strong.
That's Doctor Smart-ass. I didn't spend eight years in insult college to be called Mister.
Hi, God, it's me, Harry. Please don't turn me into a pillar of salt.
Anything with that much power and that little control, that utter lack of concern for anything but self is evil in the most effective sense of the word.
The Stone Table [was] a place that served as the OK Corral for the Faerie Courts when they decided to engage in diplomacy by means of murdering anyone on the other team.
Speed of lightning! Roar of thunder! Fighting all who rob or plunder! Underdog!
When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.
Stupid's everywhere, every day.
Internet," she said sagely. "Expanding the frontiers of adolescent knowledge.
A bunch of people are gonna be mad at me, I've got some kind of medical issue that's going to kill me in a while if I don't deal with it, oh, and the island's blowing up tomorrow and taking a whole lot of the country with it if I don't fix it.
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. 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.
