Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2024 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. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

6. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

8. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

10. “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

11. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

14. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

20. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

24. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

27. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

34. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

36. “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

37. “Once is never. Twice is always.”

— James S.A. Corey

38. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

48. “There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he’d just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be.”

— James S.A. Corey

49. “Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, did that ship just fire a spread of torpedoes at us?”

— James S.A. Corey

50. “The universe is always stranger than you think.”

— James S.A. Corey