Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Cap,” Amos said with a grin. “Anything that kills me has already killed everyone else. I was born to be the last man standing. You can count on it.” The.”

— James S.A. Corey

52. “Stop making me fall in love with you, Cap, we both know it can’t go anywhere.”

— James S.A. Corey

53. “I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me.”

— James S.A. Corey

54. “But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised. And the price was your soul.”

— James S.A. Corey

55. “A kid born today would grow up in a world where carbon-silicate lace was as common as titanium or glass. That it was a collaboration between humanity and the ghosts of a massive and alien intelligence would go right by them. Holden was one of the lucky generation who would straddle that break point, that seam between before and after that Naomi and Amos and Ip were making literal right now, and so he could be amazed by how cool it was.”

— James S.A. Corey

56. “The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve.”

— James S.A. Corey

57. “You can’t take the Razorback,” he said to the tiny red triangles. “We are gone and gone and gone.”

— James S.A. Corey

58. “Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.”

— James S.A. Corey

59. “There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he’d just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be.”

— James S.A. Corey

60. “Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, did that ship just fire a spread of torpedoes at us?”

— James S.A. Corey

61. “Sure, boss,” Havelock said. “Cool as November, smooth as China silk.”

— James S.A. Corey

62. “The universe is always stranger than you think.”

— James S.A. Corey

63. “In his opinion, faith was generally for people who were bad at math.”

— James S.A. Corey

64. “More than once he’d wandered into a brothel and left only when they threw him out with an emptied account, a sore groin, and a prostate as dry as the Sahara desert.”

— James S.A. Corey

65. “You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.”

— James S.A. Corey

66. “Trashy people puke,” Tilly said. “Ladies are unwell.”

— James S.A. Corey

67. “You’ll have something to ride on that doesn’t make your cock look as small as that gaudy turd.”

— James S.A. Corey

68. “It’s the basic problem with religion, be it Jesus or Vishnu or God Emperors. Ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy.”

— James S.A. Corey

69. “Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.”

— James S.A. Corey

70. “History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect.”

— James S.A. Corey

71. “There are two sides in this, but they aren’t inner planets and outer ones. Belters and everyone else. It’s not like that. It’s the people who want more violence and the ones who want less. And no matter what other variable you sample out of, you’ll find some of both.”

— James S.A. Corey

72. “One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.”

— James S.A. Corey

73. “Avasarala laughed at that. “True. But if he’s sending his hired killer to Earth, we – ” “Wait, what?” “If Holden was – ” “Forget Holden. You called me his hired killer. Is that how you guys think of me? The killer on Holden’s payroll?” Avasarala frowned. “You’re not?” “Well, mostly I’m a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante’s killer? That’s kind of awesome.”

— James S.A. Corey

74. “The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets.”

— James S.A. Corey

75. “There’s a thing that happens,” Avasarala said, “when unthinkable things become thinkable. We’re in a moment of chaos. Everything’s up for grabs. Legitimacy itself is up for grabs. That’s where we are now.”

— James S.A. Corey

76. “Do we have a plan?” “A couple,” Jim said. “Either of them good?” “Oh, no. Not at all. Just different flavors of terrible.”

— James S.A. Corey

77. “But pacifism only works when your enemy has a conscience.”

— James S.A. Corey

78. “Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas.”

— James S.A. Corey

79. “Ferns can be very aggressive,” Prax said.”

— James S.A. Corey

80. “He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time.”

— James S.A. Corey

81. “Boarding a ship was one of the riskiest maneuvers in naval combat. It was basically a race between the boarders rushing to the engine room and the collective will of those who had their fingers on the self-destruct button.”

— James S.A. Corey

82. “I didn’t switch sides. I stopped playing.”

— James S.A. Corey

83. “All of human civilization had been built out of the ruins of what had come before. Life itself was a grand chemical improvisation that began with the simplest replicators and grew and collapsed and grew again. Catastrophe was just one part of what always happened. It was a prelude to what came next. “You.”

— James S.A. Corey

84. “We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us. Belters are crazy terrorists. Earthers are lazy gluttons. Martians are cogs in a great big machine.” “Men are fighters,” Naomi said, and then, her voice growing bleak. “Women are nurturing and sweet and they stay home with the kids. It’s always been like that. We always react to the stories about people, not who they really are.” “And look where it got us,” Holden said.”

— James S.A. Corey

85. “He’s using you as his external, aftermarket conscience.”

— James S.A. Corey

86. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’ll give me all the kingdoms of the Earth if I just bow down and do one act of worship for you?” Dresden cocked his head. “I don’t know the reference.”

— James S.A. Corey

87. “You think he may be a triple agent?” “It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. The one thing you know about someone who’s willing to compromise his allies is that he’s willing to compromise his allies.”

— James S.A. Corey

88. “Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.”

— James S.A. Corey

89. “In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.”

— James S.A. Corey

90. “The keel-mounted rail gun pushed the whole ship backward in a solid mathematical relationship to the mass of the two-kilo tungsten round moving at a measurable fraction of c. Newton’s third law expressed as violence. Holden’s.”

— James S.A. Corey

91. “The massive radiation exposure had failed to give him superpowers.”

— James S.A. Corey

92. “The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.”

— James S.A. Corey

93. “There was an old joke. Miller didn’t remember where he’d heard it. Girl’s at her own father’s funeral, meets this really cute guy. They talk, hit it off, but he leaves before she can get his number. Girl doesn’t know how to track the guy down. So a week later, she kills her mom. Big laugh.”

— James S.A. Corey

94. “It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”

— James S.A. Corey

95. “It was contrast that gave things shape. Brightness made darkness. Fullness made emptiness. Loneliness defined the borders of whatever not-loneliness was called. They were comparative.”

— James S.A. Corey

96. “They weren’t really stopping, of course. Nothing in space ever actually stopped; it only came into a matching orbit with some other object. They were now following CA-2216862 on its merry millennium-long trip around the sun.”

— James S.A. Corey

97. “It had been the most complex, difficult feat of mass-scale engineering humanity had ever accomplished until the next thing they did.”

— James S.A. Corey

98. “He hadn’t been aware he’d felt wrong until he suddenly felt right again.”

— James S.A. Corey

99. “If you don’t have the data you need, play with the data you have, see if something comes out of it.”

— James S.A. Corey

100. “The deep human instinct to come together in crisis. To take care of each other. In its best light, it was what made humanity human. But he also had the dark suspicion that it was a kind of bargaining. Look, universe, see how kind and gentle and nice I am? Don’t let the hammer fall on me. Even if it was only grief and fear, he’d take it. Anything that helped them all treat each other well.”

— James S.A. Corey