Jim Butcher Quotes

People expect quick results.

The West is very impatient. You want overnight change.

We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.

We live in a world of instant gratification, the world of the quick fix.

Impatience translates itself into a desire to have something immediate done about it all, and, as is generally the case with impatience, resolves itself in the easiest way that lies ready to hand.

If someone says they're going to ring me at 10 o'clock and it's 10 past and they haven't rung, I'm irritated.

That's the problem with our industry: patience. People want instant NBA stars, and that's not going to happen.

I am terrible. When I buy stuff, I want it straight away. If it says two to three weeks delivery - no way. I will find somewhere that will deliver it that afternoon.

No one wants to be patient. No one wants to wait for anything. They want it right now - that instant gratification.

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows.

It's like a child who is used to having ice cream whenever he wants. When it doesn't come when he asks he tends to get confused and nervous.

The more haste, ever the worst speed.

I was guaranteed a hundred thousand dollars a year for five years, which was big money in the early 60's. You think, acquiring that should cool you out, but for me it wasn't true.

Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespected hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

After all, what could you expect from a pig but a grunt?

Most people rush after pleasure so fast that they rush right past it.

Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

In our pursuit of the things of this world, we usually prevent enjoyment, by expectation; we anticipate our own happiness, and eat out the heart and sweetness of worldly pleasures, by delightful forethoughts of them; so that when we come to possess them, they do not answer the expectation, nor satisfy the desires which were raised about them, and they vanish into nothing.

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

This isn't a Christmas special! This is my life. In the real world, miracles and goodness just don't happen.

I conduct my life with an expectation that people will do the right thing. Yet even with all my experience, I am still surprised when they do not.

You know I'm getting a little tired of waiting for you to catch on.

Disappointment proves that expectations were mistaken.