Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No rest for the wicked, no peace for the good.”

— James S.A. Corey

2. “You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you.”

— James S.A. Corey

3. “Stars are better off without us.”

— James S.A. Corey

4. “It’s just a drop in the bucket, but that’s how buckets are filled.”

— James S.A. Corey

5. “What did you do?” Fred asked. “There was a button,” Holden said. “I pushed it.” “Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn’t it?”

— James S.A. Corey

6. “As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way.” She.”

— James S.A. Corey

7. “I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid.”

— James S.A. Corey

8. “Doors and corners are always dangerous, because you’re moving into something without being sure what’s there. By the time you see the enemy, you’re exposed to them.” “Sir?” Havelock.”

— James S.A. Corey

9. “There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.”

— James S.A. Corey

10. “Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.”

— James S.A. Corey

11. “Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.”

— James S.A. Corey

12. “Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.”

— James S.A. Corey

13. “If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.”

— James S.A. Corey

14. “In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.”

— James S.A. Corey

15. “Prepare us for what?” Holden asked. “To poke gods with a sharp stick?” “No, Captain Holden. No sticks,” Duarte said. “When you fight gods, you storm heaven.”

— James S.A. Corey

16. “The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away.”

— James S.A. Corey

17. “When the crisis comes, we all pull together naturally. It’s easy then. It’s when things drag on too long that we have to make the effort. We need to make sure everyone sees we’re all in this together.”

— James S.A. Corey

18. “My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.” At.”

— James S.A. Corey

19. “You’re the predator right up until you’re prey.”

— James S.A. Corey

20. “I believe there is a dignity in consequences, Captain. I think there’s a kind of truth in them, and I try to cultivate a profound respect for truth.”

— James S.A. Corey

21. “Nothing degraded morale like the sense that the potential for excellence was being denied.”

— James S.A. Corey

22. “No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”

— James S.A. Corey

23. “Thing about civilization, it’s what keeps people civil. You get rid of one, you can’t count on the other.”

— James S.A. Corey

24. “Every great nation, they said, was founded on a knife and a lie.”

— James S.A. Corey

25. “Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that.”

— James S.A. Corey

26. “That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.”

— James S.A. Corey

27. “I can’t fight pirates without coffee.”

— James S.A. Corey

28. “Downtime’s easier to enjoy when I know it’ll end.”

— James S.A. Corey

29. “Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option. When you can’t think of a good rebuttal for your opponent’s argument, you can always punch them in the face.”

— James S.A. Corey

30. “Because we’re human, and humans are mean, independent monkeys that reached their greatness by killing every other species of hominid that looked at us funny.”

— James S.A. Corey

31. “That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.”

— James S.A. Corey

32. “The more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful.”

— James S.A. Corey

33. “You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it.”

— James S.A. Corey

34. “Holden had once dated a Buddhist who said that death was merely a different state of being, and people only feared the unknown that lay behind that transition. Death without warning was preferable, as it removed all fear. He felt he now had the counterargument.”

— James S.A. Corey

35. “When people get too comfortable, they get loose. Sloppy.”

— James S.A. Corey

36. “It was, Elvi thought, like finding a sea turtle who thoroughly understood Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but didn’t have any sea-turtley application for it.”

— James S.A. Corey

37. “Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.”

— James S.A. Corey

38. “It was a perfunctory gesture, meaningful only in retrospect, as so many last kisses are.”

— James S.A. Corey

39. “Thank you, Mister Patel,” Holden said. “In thanks, you may now have all my stuff. I don’t care about any of it anymore.” “Including the coffee maker, sir?” “Almost all my stuff.”

— James S.A. Corey

40. “We’re not making any official statements, especially when James Holden’s in the room. No offense, but your track record for blurting information at inopportune moments is the stuff of legend.”

— James S.A. Corey

41. “Once is never. Twice is always.”

— James S.A. Corey

42. “Cap,” Amos said with a grin. “Anything that kills me has already killed everyone else. I was born to be the last man standing. You can count on it.” The.”

— James S.A. Corey

43. “Stop making me fall in love with you, Cap, we both know it can’t go anywhere.”

— James S.A. Corey

44. “But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised. And the price was your soul.”

— James S.A. Corey

45. “I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me.”

— James S.A. Corey

46. “A kid born today would grow up in a world where carbon-silicate lace was as common as titanium or glass. That it was a collaboration between humanity and the ghosts of a massive and alien intelligence would go right by them. Holden was one of the lucky generation who would straddle that break point, that seam between before and after that Naomi and Amos and Ip were making literal right now, and so he could be amazed by how cool it was.”

— James S.A. Corey

47. “Don’t let things sit for too long. It’s always tempting to just ignore the things that aren’t actually on fire just at the moment, but then you’re also committing to spend your time putting out fires.”

— James S.A. Corey

48. “The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve.”

— James S.A. Corey

49. “You can’t take the Razorback,” he said to the tiny red triangles. “We are gone and gone and gone.”

— James S.A. Corey

50. “Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.”

— James S.A. Corey