Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

453. “But if all the things in her books were about other places with other rules, then none of them could ever really be about her. It was like going to school one morning and finding out that math worked differently for you, so even if you got the same answers as everyone else, yours was wrong.”

— James S.A. Corey

454. “One thing about space: it might be a big radiation-filled vacuum that’d kill you in a heartbeat if you weren’t paying attention, but at least it never had turbulence.”

— James S.A. Corey

455. “All of the circumstances that made him your enemy will be gone. What’s the value in clinging to the hate?”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

457. “It’s hellish, that’s true. But the company’s good.” “No one I’d rather face the end of everything with than you.”

— James S.A. Corey

458. “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

459. “Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.”

— James S.A. Corey

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “We got a pilot yet?” she asked. “Alex Kamal is on the ready rotation today, so he’s our man. I kind of wish Valka had been up. He’s not the pilot Alex is, but he’s quieter, and my head hurts.” “I like Alex. He’s ebullient,” Naomi said. “I don’t know what ebullient means, but if it means Alex, it makes me tired.”

— 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. “We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.”

— James S.A. Corey

468. “We don’t want to get in a gunfight,” Holden warned Amos as they began moving again. “Yeah,” Amos said. “But if we’re in one anyway, it’ll be nice to have guns.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— 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. “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

473. “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

474. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

477. “If it had been football, Laconia would have had a world-class goalie and a couple of professional strikers against Naomi’s team of four hundred grade school children and three Donnager-class football hooligans.”

— James S.A. Corey

478. “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

479. “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

480. “Anyone who believes in a fair fight has never been in a fight.”

— James S.A. Corey

481. “Preservation is irrational because it glorifies what cannot be. The universe is in constant change from the smallest measures to the greatest. To cling to one state of being over any others is foolish and futile and doomed.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

483. “Or maybe,” Amos said, “you’re not that important and it ain’t up to you to fix the universe?”

— James S.A. Corey

484. “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

485. “Wherever people start, whatever the bring with them, humanity can still come together in heavy weather.”

— James S.A. Corey

486. “You go into a situation thinking about it a particular way, and then something changes. Then either you stick with the ideas you had before or you look at everything you have to work with and find a new shape.”

— James S.A. Corey

487. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

489. “Ferns can be very aggressive.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

492. “We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

494. “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

495. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

497. “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

498. “But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.”

— James S.A. Corey

499. “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

500. “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