Small Favour (The Dresden Files, #10)

by Jim Butcher

The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level - there weren’t any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader’s head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer’s work and skill and the reader’s imagination.

Places like this turn a man into a gerbil. He comes home and scurries inside. Then he stays there until he’s forced to go back out to the job he has to work so that he can make the mortgage payments on this gerbil habitat.’

I had wanted him to come flying in like Superman and solve my problems, and he’d let me down. We’re always disappointed when we find out someone else has human limits, the same as we do. It’s stupid for us to feel that way, and we really ought to know better, but that doesn’t seem to slow us down.

‘Caring about someone isn’t complicated,’ I said. ‘It isn’t easy. But it isn’t complicated, either. Kinda like lifting the engine block out of a car.’

‘Punctuality is for people with nothing better to do,’

The reward for work well-done is more work. ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ I muttered. I stuffed the book back in my pocket and hit the road again.