Hinade Shah > Hinade's Quotes

“I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.”
― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

“I'm never really comfortable at parties. Maybe I'm just not the partying type.
...I think it's because I'm never sure what to do with myself.
I mean, there're drinks, but I don't like being drunk.... There's music, but I never really learned to dance to anything that involved an electric guitar. There are people to talk to...but once you put all the stupid things I do aside, I'm really not that interesting. I like reading, staying home, going on walks with my dog.... Who wants to hear about that? Especially when I would have to scream it over music to which no one dances.
So I'm there but not drinking, listening to music but not dancing, and trying to have conversations with near-strangers about anything other than my own stupid life.... Leads to a lot of awkward pauses. And then I start wondering why I showed up in the first place."
-- Cold Days (The Dresden Files Book 14), pg. 33”
― Jim Butcher

“Courage is about learning how to function despite the fear, to put aside your instincts to run or give in completely to the anger born from fear. Courage is about using your brain and your heart when every cell of your body is screaming at your to fight or flee - and then following through on what you believe is the right thing to do.”
― Jim Butcher, Ghost Story

“No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens? It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realized that they're so far over the line that they can't remember where it was.”
― Jim Butcher, Cold Days

“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 darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear....”
― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

“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

“When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching -- they are your family. ”
― Jim Butcher

“Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. 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 - gradutaing, 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 expecations. 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 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.

And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life.

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

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's a 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.”
― Jim Butcher

“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.”
― Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty

“Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn't coming back?”
― Jim Butcher, Storm Front

“There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don't let anyone tell you any different.”
― Jim Butcher, Fool Moon

“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. ”
― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

“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.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“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.”
― Jim Butcher, Changes

“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.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be—even if it isn't what you expected.”
― Jim Butcher, Death Masks

“Regardless of what I think about Islam or Wicca or any other religion, the fact is that it's a group of people. Every faith has its ceremonies. And since it's made up of people, every faith also has its assholes.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night

“A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. 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. And they were my heroes.”
― Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty

“Heroism doesn't pay very well. I try to be cold-blooded and money-oriented, but I keep screwing it up.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“It's hard to think when someone's trying to kill you. We human beings aren't wired to be rational and creative when we know our lives are in danger of a swift and violent end. The body has definite ideas of which survival strategies it prefers to embrace, and those are generally limited to "rip threat to pieces" or "run like hell." No thinking need be involved, as far as our instincts are concerned.

Our instincts were a long time in the making, though, and the threats that can come after us now have outpaced them. You can't outrun a bullet, and you don't go hand-to-hand with a gunman unless you're certain you are about to die anyway. Speed and mindless aggression weren't going to keep me alive.”
― Jim Butcher, Small Favor

“Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night

“Age is always advancing and I'm fairly sure it's up to no good.”
― Jim Butcher, White Night

“There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family. Or more happy. Or more exasperated. Or more . . . secure.”
― Jim Butcher, Vignette

“Punctuality is for people with nothing better to do”
― Jim Butcher, Small Favor

“If you can't stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they're hanging around.”
― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

“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.”
― Jim Butcher, Storm Front

“I have nightmares about hell, where all I do is add up numbers and try to have conversations with people like you.”
― Jim Butcher, Vignette

“Nobody can be bad at everything. There’s no such thing as a perfect screwup.”
― Jim Butcher, Mean Streets

“There's a fine line between audacity and idiocy.”
― Jim Butcher, Turn Coat