Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.”

— James S.A. Corey

102. “Burton had sent Timmy to collect a debt, Timmy had killed the man instead, and Burton hadn’t cut him loose. Two points defined a line, but three defined the playing field. Burton didn’t always have need of boys like Timmy, but sometimes he did. Right now, he did. Lydia sighed. The churn was coming.”

— James S.A. Corey

103. “We’re all traitors now.” “Ha!” the old lady said. “Only if we lose.”

— James S.A. Corey

104. “I’ve watched too many Kurosawa movies, she thought, but couldn’t quite abandon the idea. The imagery was a lovely way of turning angst and suicidal ideation into honor and noble sacrifice.”

— James S.A. Corey

105. “I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things.”

— James S.A. Corey

106. “That’s what the Earth was. A shining jewel from space, up close a blasted landscape covered with mites living by devouring the dying.”

— James S.A. Corey

107. “That was what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.”

— James S.A. Corey

108. “Now you’re asking me to explain microwaves to a monkey.”

— James S.A. Corey

109. “Water from Saturn, vegetables and beef from the big mirror-fed greenhouses on Ganymede and Europa, organics from Earth and Mars. Power cells from Io, Helium-3 from the refineries on Rhea and Iapetus. A river of wealth and power unrivaled in human history came through Ceres.”

— James S.A. Corey

110. “Also, Nathan, if you’re listening, and I assume you are, I’m the best and only friend you’ve got. Give her permission to share what she has, or I swear to God I’ll have you turning tricks out of a prefab shed on the side of the highway. I’m trying to save humanity here.”

— James S.A. Corey

111. “Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there’s just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.”

— James S.A. Corey

112. “It’s always been like this, he thinks. From when Moses saw the promised land that he could never enter, people have been on their deathbeds just wanting to see what happens next. He wonders if that’s what makes the promised land holy: that you can see it but you can’t quite reach it. The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.”

— James S.A. Corey

113. “All of them do what they think is right, and tell themselves that they’re moral people with the strength to do the necessary things, however terrible they seem at the time. Every atrocity that has been done to us had someone behind it who thought what they did was justified. And.”

— James S.A. Corey

114. “Is that possible?” the duty officer said, her voice small and tight. “Only if you define ‘possible’ as things that have already happened,” Naomi said, not turning to look at her.”

— James S.A. Corey

115. “What had been inexplicable became inevitable.”

— James S.A. Corey

116. “Later, when you’re wishing we had this stuff, I am going to be merciless in my mockery. And then we’ll die.”

— James S.A. Corey

117. “A soft hushing sound, like fingernails scratching down an endless sheet of paper.”

— James S.A. Corey

118. “Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp.”

— James S.A. Corey

119. “The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.”

— James S.A. Corey

120. “The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms.”

— James S.A. Corey

121. “Someone would run a card game or set up a pachinko parlor or start a little protection racket. People would be bribed to do things or not do things. It was what happened when you put people together.”

— James S.A. Corey

122. “That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.”

— James S.A. Corey

123. “The best scientific minds of the system were staring at the data with their jaws slack, and the reason no one was panicking yet was that no one could agree on what they should panic about.”

— James S.A. Corey

124. “Living on the surface of a planet, mass sucking at every bone and muscle, and nothing but gravity to keep your air close, seemed like a fast path to crazy.”

— James S.A. Corey

125. “Lives had more turning points than seams of ore, and not every change was obvious, even looking back.”

— James S.A. Corey

126. “Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better.”

— James S.A. Corey

127. “We’re like children,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. “Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.”

— James S.A. Corey

128. “A bicycle?” Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. “Sure. They don’t need fuel, they don’t get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You’re looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes are the way to go.”

— James S.A. Corey

129. “Chief security officer on an OPA ship was a half-assed kind of position, one part cop, one part efficiency expert, and pretty much all den mother to a crew of a thousand people with their own agendas and petty power struggles and opinions on how he should be doing his job better.”

— James S.A. Corey

130. “She was on their bed, her knees curled up toward her chest, her eyes closed, her hair spilling over the gel. She snored a little, soft animal sounds of peace and contentment.”

— James S.A. Corey

131. “The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray. To make sense of what she saw. To comfort herself. To give the world some sense of purpose or meaning. Species rose in an environment, and that environment changed. It was the nature of the universe, as true here as it had been on Earth.”

— James S.A. Corey

132. “Acceleration is pressing his eyeballs out of their right shape. High tech astigmatism.”

— James S.A. Corey

133. “She’d grown up in Martian gravity. She had to mass a hundred kilos at one g, easy.”

— James S.A. Corey

134. “Yeah,” Alex said in his drawling voice. “I mean, Naomi only got beat half to death. She can cut this Clarissa slack, it’s no big deal. But the captain’s girlfriend got hurt. He’s the real victim here.”

— James S.A. Corey

135. “Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.”

— James S.A. Corey

136. “Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.”

— James S.A. Corey

137. “Ganymede was the breadbasket of the Belt, Pallas was its forge.”

— James S.A. Corey

138. “Alien superweapons were used,” Alex said, walking into the room, sleep-sweaty hair standing out from his skull in every direction. “The laws of physics were altered, mistakes were made.”

— James S.A. Corey

139. “He’d read accounts of extravehicular euphoria, but the experience was unlike anything he’d imagined. He was the eye of God, drinking in the light of infinite stars, and he was a speck of dust on a speck of dust, clipped by his mag boots to the body of a ship unthinkably more powerful than himself, and unimportant before the face of the abyss.”

— James S.A. Corey

140. “And that’s the point I keep trying to make with her, my friend. In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.”

— James S.A. Corey

141. “He was her best friend, but he was terrible husband material. After his second failure at it Bobbie pointed out that if he just wanted something to hurt, she could break his arm for him and save everyone time.”

— James S.A. Corey

142. “Murtry swung first, so technically, that was self-defense. And if I’d wanted him dead, don’t you think he’d be dead? It’s not like I quit hitting him because I was tired.”

— James S.A. Corey

143. “Sometimes you don’t get redeemed... 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

144. “Point of clarification,” Alex said, raising his hand. “We have an apocalypse comin’? Was that a thing we knew about?” “Venus,” Avasarala said. “Oh. That apocalypse,” Alex said, lowering his hand. “Right.”

— James S.A. Corey

145. “Having a new high consul would be difficult under any circumstances, but it would be less difficult if there were a story with it.”

— James S.A. Corey

146. “Because he’s Amos. He’s like a pit bull. You know he could tear your throat out, but he’s loyal to a fault and you just want to hug him.” She.”

— James S.A. Corey

147. “I don’t believe war ever does. It’s a madness that’s in our nature. Sometimes it recurs; sometimes it subsides.” “Sounds like a disease.” “The herpes simplex of the species?”

— James S.A. Corey

148. “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

149. “He’d never been to military pilot school, but he knew that years of training had compartmentalized Alex’s brain into two halves: piloting problems and, secondarily, everything else.”

— James S.A. Corey

150. “You’ve got a pit bull on one side of you and a rottweiler on the other, first thing you do is drop your steak.”

— James S.A. Corey