Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

453. “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

454. “I took an ethics seminar with her as part of my postdoctorate work. There was a story we read about this beautiful, utopic land where everything was wonderful and enlightened and pleasant and good and just, except for one child who had to live in confusion and misery. One child, in exchange for paradise to everyone else.” “I know that one. Omelas.”

— James S.A. Corey

455. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

458. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

460. “A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are. I’m who I am, and it wasn’t what my wife wanted me to be, and somethin’ had to break.”

— James S.A. Corey

461. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

463. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

465. “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.”

— James S.A. Corey

466. “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

467. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

469. “When everyone thinks the flood’s coming up, each little bit of normalcy is a sandbag.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— 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. “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. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

476. “Ferns can be very aggressive.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

484. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

496. “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

497. “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

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

— 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