Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)

by Jim Butcher

Being the Winter Knight doesn’t help you be a good dad, or make better pancakes. It doesn’t help you understand philosophy, create beauty, or garner knowledge.

The way he said we was something new. He wasn’t using the word as an inclusive one, like, we are all friends. He was using it as an exclusive term. We, all of us, not you.

Fear is a prison. But when you combine it with secrets, it becomes especially toxic, vicious. It puts us all into solitary, unable to hear one another clearly.

“Only the young think being called old is an insult,” I said, still smiling. “I am what I am, regardless of what anyone calls it. No one can change it, regardless of what anyone calls it. And it mostly means that nothing has managed to kill me yet.”

“Hey. It was hard, for everyone. But we came through it. And with all these scars, we have to have learned a lesson somewhere, right?”