Jim Butcher Quotes

By the age of 50, I would like to know that I'm not dead - that there's some continuity to my life.

When you were born, you cried and everybody else was happy. The only question that matters is this - when you die, will you be happy when everybody else is crying?

Jane Fonda, who divided her life into three acts, decided after her sixtieth birthday that she was now facing the final act, and came to the following conclusion: "I thought to myself, well if that's the case and if what I'm scared of isn't death, but getting to the end with regrets, then I've got to figure out what would be the things that I would regret when I got to the last act if I hadn't done them or achieved them by then. And they were: having an intimate relationship and having made a difference."

At the end of your life, you are going to want to know that you made some kind of difference.

When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.

You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life - so that if it were over tomorrow, you'd be content with yourself.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

It's hard to say what I want my legacy to be when I'm long gone.

I became obsessed with all these women who die never feeling they did anything extraordinary with their lives.

At the end of our lives we all ask, 'Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?'

One of the things you'll discover... as you listen to your own soul is that you spend a great amount of your life trying to bring meaning to your own life. And, by the way, most people are not going to church, so the place they're actually trying to find meaning in their life is at work.

When men are not regretting that life is so short, they are doing something to kill time.

It's very easy to go through your whole life and never really get anything done or have any real meaningful interactions or relationships. All of a sudden you're dead, and I'm going to say that's got to be a letdown.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.

If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it, you just feel that before you die, you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.

I will not have died unfulfilled if it does not occur in my lifetime.

When my brother passed away... I made a decision that I might die soon, and if I die, I want people to know who I really am.

I really don't want the highlight of my life to be my success as an investor. Genuinely. My idea of death would be that person who is still telling you about that goal he scored in 1974.

I'm very happy with where I arrived, both personally and professionally. I can say more so personally, because my career will have to end eventually. I do not know how long it will be, but eventually it will end, and the personal will continue.

At some point in your life, you need to sit down and say, 'What do I want to do? How do I want to be remembered? What's my legacy? And what's important to me?'

Death is Inevitable. Living a life we can be proud of is something we can control.

You reach a point at which you have to view your life through the things you've spent so much time doing. The alternative is a perilous feeling of waste.

I think the saddest thing in the world will be for people who face their death and realize they never lived. That won't be me.

Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life's legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly.