I felt my face stretch in a victorious smile. The potion had worked. I was inside. I had to suppress an urge to break into a soft shoe routine. Sometimes being able to use magic was so cool.

The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.

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

Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.

I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary.

HARRY DRESDEN—WIZARD Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment

I checked my gear, my pockets, my shoelaces, and realized that I had crossed the line between making sure I was ready and trying to postpone the inevitable.

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

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.

I died. I died and someone made a clerical error and I am in Heaven.

There is the world that should be and the world that is. We live in one and must create the other.

No matter how much you stress or obsess about the past or future, you can't change either one. In the present is where your power lies.

Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.

Men exist for the sake of one another.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

All that hath been majestical In life or death, since time began, Is native in the simple heart of all, The angel heat of man.

I have always heard that uber-successful people who write books about how to become uber-successful all have one thing in common: They all meditate every day. I consider yoga my meditation.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

I will not be governed by the tyranny of immediacy.

I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.

People very rarely think in groups; they talk together, they exchange information, they adjudicate, they make compromises. But they do not think; they do not create.