Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Insurgencies are historically nearly impossible to eradicate, for a few very simple reasons. The insurgents don’t wear uniforms. They look just like the innocent populace. And, they’re the friends and family of that populace. This means that every insurgent killed tends to increase recruiting for the insurgency.”

— James S.A. Corey

102. “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

103. “What had been inexplicable became inevitable.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

106. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

108. “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

109. “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

110. “We’re all going to lose each other eventually, and that’s been true since before we were a crew. That’s what being born means. Everything else is just specifics.”

— James S.A. Corey

111. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

124. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

126. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

128. “The more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.”

— James S.A. Corey

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “Take a bar of metal and put a single notch in it. The two lengths thus defined have a relationship that can be expressed as the ratio between them. In theory, therefore, any rational number can be expressed with a single mark on a bar of metal. Using a simple alphabetic code, a mark that calculated to a ratio of .1215225 could be read as 12-15-22-5, or “l-o-v-e.” The complete plays of Shakespeare could be written in a single mark, if it were possible to measure accurately enough.”

— James S.A. Corey

142. “Shift in language is shift in consciousness, yeah,” Josep.”

— James S.A. Corey

143. “Only, so far, it was like a bunch of lizards watching the World Cup. Politely put, they weren’t sure what they were looking at.”

— James S.A. Corey

144. “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

145. “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

146. “A decent idea now is way better than a brilliant plan when it’s too late.” “I.”

— James S.A. Corey

147. “Lost cause. Amos will be murdered by space hookers, but at least he’ll die the way he lived.”

— James S.A. Corey

148. “We’re little people in big times, yeah?”

— James S.A. Corey

149. “But, Bobbie? Really, really don’t die out there.” “No one lives forever, sir,” Bobbie said, “but as long as it doesn’t compromise the mission, I’ll try to live through it.” “Thanks.”

— James S.A. Corey

150. “She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.”

— James S.A. Corey