Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

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. “It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.”

— James S.A. Corey

456. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

466. “Ferns can be very aggressive.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

469. “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

470. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

472. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

474. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

483. “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

484. “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

485. “It might be an artifact of the way human minds seemed to peg “normal” to whatever they’d experienced first and then bristled at everything afterward that failed to match it closely enough.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

491. “Civilization has a built-in lag time. Just like light delay. We fly out here to this new place, and because we’re civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn’t. We build it. And while we’re building it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American west came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “I’m heading down to the galley for a minute,” he said. “Grab a coffee for me too,” Alex said. “Oh no. Not coffee. I’m maybe up to some chamomile or warm milk. Something soothing and unaggressive.” “Sounds good,” Alex said. “When you change your mind and get some coffee, grab one for me too.”

— James S.A. Corey

498. “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

499. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey