Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.”

— James S.A. Corey

452. “It was an odd group of people to fall in love with, to adopt as your own kin and tribe, but there it was, and she wasn’t ever going back.”

— James S.A. Corey

453. “It was always dangerous when the universe fell down in a pattern where the thing you wanted and the wise path were the same.”

— James S.A. Corey

454. “Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.”

— James S.A. Corey

455. “He may be a god or he may be a devil, but he can’t stomach the idea of being just an unreasonably pretty man who stumbled into the right combination of charisma and opportunity.”

— James S.A. Corey

456. “Bull listened to the voices of the family he never saw except on a screen, the lives that didn’t intersect his own. The love he felt for them surprised him, and kept him from putting his own report in among them. It would only scare them, and they wouldn’t understand it.”

— James S.A. Corey

457. “People, building on the ruins of what had come before, just like they always did. So many things had been lost, but it was the missing people that hurt the most. Just like they always did.”

— James S.A. Corey

458. “I think we got lucky. I think we were one little system in a vast, unreachable universe that was always on the edge of destroying itself, and now we have thirteen hundred chances to figure out how to live with each other. How to be gentle with each other. How to get it right. It’s better odds than we had.”

— James S.A. Corey

459. “Honor the past without living in it.”

— James S.A. Corey

460. “I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”

— James S.A. Corey

461. “It’s probably full of vomit zombies,” Holden finally said. “Want to go see?” said Miller. “Oh yeah,” Holden said.”

— James S.A. Corey

462. “Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.”

— James S.A. Corey

463. “Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?”

— James S.A. Corey

464. “Epithets like that are an attempt to dehumanize a group so that you won’t feel as bad about killing them.”

— James S.A. Corey

465. “It’s not healthy having God sleeping right there where we can all watch him dream.”

— James S.A. Corey

466. “A world no longer of haves and have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.”

— James S.A. Corey

467. “You’re the talker. I’ve seen you face down Fred Johnson, UN naval captains, OPA cowboys, and drugged-up space pirates. You talk out your ass better than most people do using their mouth and sober.”

— James S.A. Corey

468. “They’re people,” Naomi said, exhaustion in her tone. “We’re trying to do all of this with humans. Shortsightedness is coded in our DNA.”

— James S.A. Corey

469. “Miller smiled. All his smiles looked like he was hearing a good joke at a funeral.”

— James S.A. Corey

470. “The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.”

— James S.A. Corey

471. “People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispered.”

— James S.A. Corey

472. “Breaking things was always easier than building them up.”

— James S.A. Corey

473. “For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs.”

— James S.A. Corey

474. “There was so much that they’d never seen or understood. They’d all just bumbled through, using the gates as shortcuts and hoping for the best. A species of beautiful idiots.”

— James S.A. Corey

475. “I never changed sides,” Fred said. “The sides keep changing around me. I was always the one who wanted order. Peace. Justice, even.”

— James S.A. Corey

476. “We also both know that when it comes to getting people to deny their own immediate needs in favor of a greater good, asking nicely almost never works.”

— James S.A. Corey

477. “The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.”

— James S.A. Corey

478. “Ferns can be very aggressive.”

— James S.A. Corey

479. “We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are.”

— James S.A. Corey

480. “Santichai and Melissa Supitayaporn were a pair of eighty-year-old earthborn missionaries from the Church of Humanity Ascendant, a religion that eschewed supernaturalism in all forms, and whose theology boiled down to Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that.”

— James S.A. Corey

481. “Humans, Havelock knew from long experience, were first and foremost social animals, and he himself was profoundly human. It was more romantic – hell, more masculine – to pretend he was an island, unaffected by the waves of emotion around him. But it wasn’t true, and he’d made his peace with that fact.”

— James S.A. Corey

482. “All the places you visit start changing into new ones the second you leave.”

— James S.A. Corey

483. “I have a ship with guns on it now, and the next time someone orders me to do something, I’m using them.”

— James S.A. Corey

484. “Never in human history have we discovered something useful and then chosen not to use it.”

— James S.A. Corey

485. “Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.”

— James S.A. Corey

486. “Pain reminds you that you aren’t dead yet.”

— James S.A. Corey

487. “Very few people stood wholly for the law or wholly against it, and so for them the catastrophe of the churn was an annoyance to be avoided or endured or else a titillation on the newsfeeds. That it was a question of life and death for other people spoke in its favor as entertainment.”

— James S.A. Corey

488. “Fine,” Jim said. “Just covering near-constant panic with light humor, same as anyone.”

— James S.A. Corey

489. “Tachi’s galley had a full kitchen and a table with room for twelve. It also had a full-size coffeepot that could brew forty cups of coffee in less than five minutes whether the ship was in zero g or under a five-g burn. Holden said a silent prayer of thanks for bloated military budgets and pressed the brew button. He had to restrain himself from stroking the stainless steel cover while it made gentle percolating noises.”

— James S.A. Corey

490. “Fuel, bullets, or food. The hierarchy of needs, wartime edition.”

— James S.A. Corey

491. “It felt like relief at the time. Like her soul had been rubbed raw, and the container was her bandage. Her whole life, she’d survived the unsurvivable by falling back and getting small. And every time, she had come back healed. Scarred, sometimes. But healed.”

— James S.A. Corey

492. “On her best days, she’d thought of herself like a medieval monk struggling to understand the saints to better see the face of God. More often, she felt like a termite trying to explain dogs to her fellow Isoptera so that they could all speculate about fusion jazz.”

— James S.A. Corey

493. “It was shocking to realize how much of investigation was just brute-force solutions. Going through endless lists looking for one thing that doesn’t fit.”

— James S.A. Corey

494. “Dying she could handle. Dying without any answers seemed terribly cruel.”

— James S.A. Corey

495. “That was the trick of living under the thumb of a dictator. It broke every conversation, even the private ones.”

— James S.A. Corey

496. “There are only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.”

— James S.A. Corey

497. “This isn’t science,” Lucia said. “It’s medicine. A success rate this high on a new treatment for a novel illness? We’re doing brilliantly. None of us are back to baseline yet, though. If it happens at all, it will take time.”

— James S.A. Corey

498. “More than power, Duarte made everything that surrounded him seem born of confidence. It was a good trick, because even after Holden saw through it, it still worked.”

— James S.A. Corey

499. “Laconia had always been the few and the pure against the many and the corrupt. Like the Spartans from whom they took their name, Laconians were severe within their group, both to forge the iron discipline that had led them to victory and to demonstrate to others the sincerity of their beliefs.”

— James S.A. Corey

500. “Doing the right thing has to be enough in itself. It’s not about getting the pat on the head.”

— James S.A. Corey