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“Screw up my life?” He stared at 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.” The words were light, but there was
stared at the stairs for a second, but they didn’t get any shorter or turn into an escalator or anything, so I sighed and started painfully hauling myself up them, one step at a time.
Nearly everyone underestimates how powerful the touch of another person’s hand can be. The need to be touched is something so primal, so fundamentally a part of our existence as human beings that its true impact upon us can be difficult to put into words. That power doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex, either. From the time we are infants, we learn to associate the touch of a human hand with safety, with comfort, with love.
“Maybe it’s the cloak,” Bob suggested brightly. “Harry, do you feel any more judgmental and self-righteous than you did this morning?”
“A house doesn’t make a home. When the place has got history, family, emotions, worries, joys worked into the wood, that’s when it gets a solid threshold.
The door to the bedroom opened and my half brother Thomas emerged, freshly showered and smelling faintly of cologne. He was right around six feet in height, and was built like the high priest of Bowflex—all lean muscle, sculpted and well formed, not too much of a good
The authorities arrived and replaced crisis with aftermath.
“You’re a decent man,” Murphy said, lowering her hand without removing it from my fingers. “Painfully oblivious, sometimes. But you’ve got a good heart. It’s why you’re so hard on yourself. You’re tired, hungry, and hurting, and you saw the bad guys do
Life’s easier when you can write off others as monsters, as demons, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared. The thing is, you can’t do that without becoming them, just a little.
I scowled at him. “Not every good thing that happens is divine intervention, Michael.” “True,” Michael said, “but I prefer to give Him the credit unless I have a good reason to believe otherwise. It seems more polite than the other way around.”
Many sprinkler systems have closed holding tanks, and God only knew how many years that water had been in there, waiting to be used.
Playing cat and mouse is generally only fun for the cat. My body, meanwhile, had flung itself to one side, forcing
Walls block line of involvement.
Molly was committing dinner by that time, aided and abetted by Sanya, who seemed to take some kind of
made a sandwich out of things. I’m an American. We can eat anything as long as it’s between two pieces of bread. With enough mustard I almost couldn’t taste the roast. For a few minutes I paid attention to eating, and was hungry enough to actually enjoy part of the experience—the part where Molly’s pot roast finally terrified my growling stomach into silence.
and with the Archive under their control, they could do it. Maybe they’d use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they’d crash the world economy. Maybe they’d turn every program on television into one of those reality shows.” “That’s mostly done already, Harry.” “Oh. Well. I’ve got to believe that the world is worth saving anyway.”
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.
Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little bit too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights—another constant, those lights—humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation.
“He thought I was a dangerous animal and needed to be put down. He really believed it, and acted accordingly.” Butters gave me a quick glance. “And you’re helping him?” “He was wrong,” I said. “That doesn’t make him a villain. It just makes him an asshole. It isn’t reason enough to kill him.”
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.
“Witnesses can be mistaken—or bought. Theories and deductions can throw you completely off target.” She tossed the page back onto the coffee table. “But the money always tells you something. Assuming you can find it.”
“You’re in America now,” I said. “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.” Anastasia’s mouth curved up at one corner. “You brought a sandwich?” “Who do I look like, Kissinger?”
After he was gone, I turned to regard the tigers. I wondered if I knew them for what they really were, or if all I could see were the stripes.
But one day before too long, the things I had taken into me would change me. And I probably wouldn’t mind, even if I bothered to notice it happening. That was the nature of such power. You didn’t feel it changing you.
There is no sensation to warn you when your soul turns black.
Murphy smirked down at her beer and said, “It’s always staggering to run into one of your blind spots. You don’t have many of them, but when you do they’re a mile wide.” She shook her head. “You didn’t really answer my question, you know.”
Uriel nodded. “That’s the difficult part of being mortal. Of having choice. Much is hidden from you.” He sighed. “Love your child, Dresden. Everything else flows from there. A wise man said that,” Uriel said. “Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return.”
