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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

457. “If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur.”

— James S.A. Corey

458. “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

459. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

461. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

465. “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

466. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

469. “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

470. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

472. “Ferns can be very aggressive.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

475. “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

476. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

478. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

480. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

482. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

484. “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

485. “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

486. “However bad it was, however mind-breaking and strange and painful, the mundane insisted on its cut.”

— James S.A. Corey

487. “You’re cute when you’re being noble,” she said. “But you need to stare off into the distance more.”

— James S.A. Corey

488. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

496. “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

497. “Tanaka opened her hands, palms up. Floating as she was with legs crossed at the ankle, she felt like a painting of a saint being assumed into heaven. The patron saint of putting up with idiots, whoever that was.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

499. “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

500. “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