Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)

by Jim Butcher

“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.”

Sometimes the best defense is a T. rex.

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.”

Sanya clapped Butters on the shoulder, knocking him six inches, and suggested, “Time to get Kalashnikov.”

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

I mean, my God, she had kicked Mab through walls. Mab. Walls, plural. Ethniu had gone through her as if she didn’t exist.

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.