"Don't call me a dinosaur. It isn't fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?"

"I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching--they are your family."

"Ease off the martyr throttle."

"Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face."

"In the name of the Pizza Lord. Charge!"

"Pain is a byproduct of life. That's the truth. Life sometimes sucks. That's true for everyone. But if you don't face the pain and the suck, you don't ever get the other things either. Laughter. Joy. Love. Pain passes, but those things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for."

"I'm brilliant as well as skilled," he said modestly. "It's a great burden, all of that on top of my angelic good looks. But I try to soldier on as best I can."

"You beg fate to make your fears into reality, Aleran. But for the moment, they are only fears. They may come. If so, then face them and overcome them. Until then, pay them no mind. You have enough to think on."

"Hell's bells, Susan, you don't know what you've done. You've got to get outof here."She snorted. "Like hell.""I mean it," I said. "You're in danger.""Relax, Harry. I'm not letting anyone lick me, and I'm not looking anyone in the eyes. It's kind of like visiting New York."

"Vanity, thy name is vampire."

"At one time in my life, a shapeshifted, demonically possessed maniac crashing through a window and trying to rip my face off would have come as an enormous and nasty surprise.But that time was pretty much in the past."

"The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place."

"I kept a straight face while my inner Neanderthal spluttered and then went on a mental rampage through a hypothetical produce section, knocking over shelves and spattering fruit everywhere in sheer frustration, screaming, 'JUST TELL ME WHOSE SKULL TO CRACK WITH MY CLUB, DAMMIT!"

"Fire isn't always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change."

"Harry," Bob drawled, his eye lights flickering smugly, "what you know about women, I could juggle."

"If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt."

"Age is always advancing and I'm fairly sure it's up to no good."

"Black Court vampires. I just shortened it some."Ebenezar tsked. "Blampires. That's the problem with you young people. Shortening all the words."

"God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices--exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life."

"There is no spoon."

"Things are not always as bad as they seem. Sometimes, the darkness only makes it easier to see the light."

"Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can't weave together a spell that you don't beleive in."

"Insecurity, thy name is teenager."

"We are as the dead," Sha said. "Our purpose is to dedicate our lives to the service of our lord. And, when it is necessary, to surrender those lives. When we become what we are, we lose our lives - our names, our family, our homes, and our honour. All that remains is our lord."

"But you'd get arguments from all kinds of people that the Bible has got to be perfect. That God would not permit such errors to be made in the Holy Word.""I thought God gave everyone free will. Which would presumably - and evidently - include the freedom to be incorrect when translating one language into another.""Stop making me think. I'm believing over here."

"It is often very useful for others to think you less intelligent than you are," Benedict said, his tone amused. "It works particularly well against those who aren't as intelligent as you in the first place."

"Tropical trees had been planted throughout the room, along with bright flowering plants that were busy committing the olfactory floral equivalent of aggravated assault."

"Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries."

"It's all right to be afraid. You just don't let it stop you from doing your job."

"You don't have to make fun of it.""Actually I do," I said. "I make fun of almost everything."

"It isn't enough to stand up and fight darkness. You've got to stand apart from it, too. You've got to be different from it."

"Ack!" I said.Fearless master of the witty dialogue, that's me."

"A technicality I'm prepared to hide wildly behind."

"Smiling always seems to annoy people more than actually insulting them. Or maybe I just have an annoying smile."

"She frowned at me. "You need some rest. You look like hell. And you're obviously tired enough to have gotten the giggles."Wizards don't giggle," I said, hardly able to speak. "This is cackling."

"There're things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times."

"Her father had always said that a man could be fairly judged by the quality of his allies and that of his enemies."

"There are a lot of things I can't control. I don't know what's going to happen in the next few days.I don't want what I am going to face, what kind of choices I am going to have to make. I can't predict it. I can't control it. It's too big.' I nodded at my shovel. 'But that, I can predict. I know that if I pick up that shovel and clear the snow from the walkways, it's going to make my neighbors safer and happier.' I glanced at him and shrugged. 'It's worthwhile to me."

"I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words-and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant "I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue."

"There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares."

"And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?"

"It came charging toward me, several hundred pounds of angry-looking monster, and I did the only thing any reasonable wizard could have done.I turned around and ran like hell."

"Sometimes it isn't easy to be sane, smart, and responsible. Sometimes it sucks. Sucks wang. Camel wang. But that doesn't turn wrong into right or stupid into smart."

"Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward."

"Children have their own kind of power. When you're teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be. More understanding, more patient, more capable, more wise."

"Being a wizard gives you more power than most, but it doesn't change your heart. We're all human. We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain."

"Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope."

"I poke at my skull with a finger. It didn't feel soft or anything. I didn't feel insane. But if you'd really lost it, would you have enough left to know? Crazy people never thought they were crazy. "I've always talked to things," I said. "And to myself." "Good point," myself agreed with me. "Unless that means you've been nuts all along." "I don't need wiseass remarks," I told myself severely. "There's work to do. So shut up."

"You do everything by the book, like everybody else, you get the same results s everybody else."

"In the action business, when you don't want to say you ran like a mouse, you call it 'taking cover.' It's more heroic."