Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Live like you’re dead.”

— James S.A. Corey

102. “Do people talk about the war?” Miller asked. “Often,” the missionary said. “Anyone make sense of it?” “No. 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?” the missionary said with a laugh. “I suppose there are worse ways to think of it. I’m afraid that as long as we’re human, it will be with us.”

— James S.A. Corey

103. “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

104. “Knowing that all you can give isn’t enough is its own burden.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

106. “The concrete replaces the forest. You get in its way, you get paved over. If you can find a way to live in the cracks, you can thrive anywhere. There were always cracks.”

— 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. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

118. “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

119. “Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet. Black eyes, sharp features, lips so thin they might as well not have existed. The story on board was that she’d taken the job to escape prosecution for killing an ex-husband. Holden liked her.”

— James S.A. Corey

120. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

123. “What had been inexplicable became inevitable.”

— James S.A. Corey

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

130. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

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. “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

144. “High-functioning sociopaths,” Dresden said with a nod. He seemed pleased to explain it. “And extremely curious ones. As long as we kept them supplied with interesting problems to solve and unlimited resources, they remained quite content.”

— James S.A. Corey

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey