Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)

by Jim Butcher

Everyone wants someone to make us pancakes; we’re all just too grown-up to say it.”

“I ain’t got time to give you a graduate seminar on intention versus the natural operation of the universe until you’ve completed my ‘why it’s a damned stupid thing to trust vampires’ course.”

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.”

You can’t go around making people’s choices for them. Not if you love them.

At the end of the day, people have to be who they are. If you try to take that from them, you diminish them. You reduce them to children, unable to make decisions for themselves. There’s no way to poison your relationship with someone else faster.