Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.”

— James S.A. Corey

452. “The stars are still there,” she said. “We’ll find our own way back to them.”

— James S.A. Corey

453. “So she’d lied. That was interesting. She’d told him what he wanted to hear, and it wasn’t even because she wanted to protect him or keep him safe. It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion. And she was like them now. They’d eaten her.”

— James S.A. Corey

454. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

456. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

458. “I just had the most interesting conversation,” Fayez said. “I could say the same,” she said. “But mine’s classified, so why don’t you go first.”

— James S.A. Corey

459. “Fatalism had its dark attractions, after all. Hopelessness and despair could almost look restful.”

— James S.A. Corey

460. “Annie,” Tilly said. “If I wanted to suck vile fluids out of a flaccid and indifferent tube, I’d have stayed on Earth with my husband.”

— James S.A. Corey

461. “One little change early on could mean a whole different life.”

— James S.A. Corey

462. “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

463. “Holden turned off his newsfeed, fidgeted in his bunk, and tried to wake Miller up by staring at him. It didn’t work. The massive radiation exposure had failed to give him superpowers.”

— James S.A. Corey

464. “I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.”

— James S.A. Corey

465. “That’s the kind of stealing only governments can get away with,” Amos said.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

467. “Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective. Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out.”

— James S.A. Corey

468. “There had to be a moment, some decision that you made, and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else.”

— James S.A. Corey

469. “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

470. “History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

472. “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

473. “Maybe, if they could find a way to be gentle, the stars would be better off with them.”

— James S.A. Corey

474. “People are scared and they’re hurting, yeah? And some big man comes along, and he seems confident. He looks sure of himself. All the things that are eating at your heart, they aren’t eating at his. And yeah, he gets a team. Everyone falls in line behind him, and bad things happen. The worst things.”

— James S.A. Corey

475. “Catastrophe was just one part of what always happened. It was a prelude to what came next.”

— James S.A. Corey

476. “There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

478. “Ferns can be very aggressive.”

— James S.A. Corey

479. “The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words – the life-changing ones – should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded just like everything else.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

481. “All the while, the botanist spoke only of Mei, of his need to find her. Holden realized that he’d never in his life needed anything as badly as this man needed to see his daughter again. To his surprise, it made him sad. Prax had been robbed of everything, had all his fat boiled away; he’d been rendered down to the bare minimum of humanity. All he had left was his need to find his little girl, and Holden envied him for it.”

— James S.A. Corey

482. “Alex held it up. He’d gotten the packet from a dispenser in the men’s room. The foil had a dragon’s head embossed on it and some nonsense kanji that didn’t mean anything. Holden’s brow furrowed. “Sobriety meds?” Alex felt himself blushing and tried to hide it by smiling. “Well, I’m thinking I may be in a situation here pretty soon where everybody needs to be able to agree to whatever they’re agreeing to.”

— James S.A. Corey

483. “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

484. “Portraits of great war leaders or critical battles that looked flattering, well composed, and balanced always felt like propaganda. Tanaka had spent a lot of time in the halls of power. She’d seen many paintings of great men in uniform staring eagle-eyed into the distance where their future glory lay. She’d seen very few paintings of soldiers with only a ragged tent and a dying fire to hold back the cold nights before some stranger tried to bayonet them in the morning.”

— James S.A. Corey

485. “I’m not sure what liberty is if you’re not permitted to decide what chances you’re willing to take.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

487. “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

488. “Most of what we know isn’t why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that’s going to happen.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

490. “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

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. “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

493. “Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

495. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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