Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It had been a failure, but it was a failure he understood, and that made it a victory.”

— James S.A. Corey

152. “It’s a war. Wars aren’t like that.” “Aren’t like what?” Roberts said. “Aren’t like stories about wars,” Vandercaust answered solemnly. “Stories about wars come after.”

— James S.A. Corey

153. “Stupidity was usually a lesser crime than vigilantism.”

— James S.A. Corey

154. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

160. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

162. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

164. “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

165. “A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are.”

— James S.A. Corey

166. “Partners,” she said, and fired two rounds into his head.”

— James S.A. Corey

167. “Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it.”

— James S.A. Corey

168. “Human violence as a kind of fractal – self-similar on all scales from bar fight to system-wide war. The buildup of insults and lost face that swelled over the course of an evening or a century. The shoving and shoving back, neither side sure they wanted to escalate and uncertain how to back down.”

— James S.A. Corey

169. “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

170. “You train dogs by rewarding them. Punishment doesn’t actually work.”

— James S.A. Corey

171. “If the woman still had a soul, it had been pressed thin enough to see through.”

— James S.A. Corey

172. “Kings were always the last to feel the famine. That wasn’t just the Belt. That was all of history. The people who’d just been going about their lives were the ones who could speak to the actual cost of war. They paid it first. Men like Marco could orchestrate vast battles, order the looting and destruction of worlds, and never run out of coffee.”

— James S.A. Corey

173. “Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks.”

— James S.A. Corey

174. “Since this used to be a Martian ship, I thought maybe you’d have reloads that would fit our racks.” “Sure,” Captain Tseng said without a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll have the destroyer Sally Ride pull alongside for munitions transfer.”

— James S.A. Corey

175. “The ones that don’t kill you don’t count.”

— James S.A. Corey

176. “His first lover – Diane Redstone, her name was – had a phrase for moments like this. Nice woods, she’d say, and then get up out of their bed and go to work. He hadn’t understood where the saying came from until years after they parted for the last time. Now that he did, he couldn’t help harboring an irrational dislike of Robert Frost.”

— James S.A. Corey

177. “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

178. “We’ve survived it. It’s a known quantity. I have a binder with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for conflict with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios about what we do if they develop an unexpected new technology. The binder for what we do if something comes up from Venus? It’s three pages long, and it begins Step One: Find God.” Errinwright.”

— James S.A. Corey

179. “You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.”

— James S.A. Corey

180. “Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”

— James S.A. Corey

181. “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

182. “We all grieve in our own ways,” Avasarala said. “For what it’s worth, you’ll never kill enough people to keep your platoon from dying. No more than I can save enough people that one of them will be Charanpal.”

— James S.A. Corey

183. “There were so many last times that passed unrecognized. Knowing in the moment what was ending and wouldn’t come again was precious.”

— James S.A. Corey

184. “Routine was what kept the darkness at bay, when anything did.”

— James S.A. Corey

185. “Governments exist on confidence. Not on liberty. Not on righteousness. Not on force. They exist because people believe that they do. Because they don’t ask questions.”

— James S.A. Corey

186. “She preferred the times when she could pretend that she was in a gravity well to the little reminders that she was the puppet of acceleration and inertia.”

— James S.A. Corey

187. “He projected selfless heroism on everyone because that’s what he wanted to see in people.”

— James S.A. Corey

188. “You ask yourself what happens,” Miller said. “Ask yourself what Naomi’d do.” Holden barked out a laugh. “Is that how you make your decisions?” Miller let his eyes close. Juliette Mao was there, sitting on the couch at her old apartment on Ceres. Fighting the crew of the stealth ship to a standstill. Burst open by the alien virus on the floor of her shower stall. “Something like it,” Miller said.”

— James S.A. Corey

189. “That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.”

— James S.A. Corey

190. “My hallucinations are of the alien mind control variety.”

— James S.A. Corey

191. “Apocalyptic explosions, dead reactors, terrorists, mass murder, death-slugs, and now a blindness plague. This is a terrible planet. We should not have come here.”

— James S.A. Corey

192. “He wouldn’t miss the planet, but he would miss the people. Just like always.”

— James S.A. Corey

193. “He felt the decision like a seed crystal giving form to the chaos around it, solid, hard, resolute. Desperation, mourning, and a million farewells, one to the other. The word quarantine came to him, and with the logic of dreams, it carried an unsupportable weight of horror. But within it, like the last voice in Pandora’s box, the promise of reunion. One day, when the solution was found, everything that had been lost would be regained. The gates reopened. The vast mind restored.”

— James S.A. Corey

194. “I told you before that Johnson would be off the board, and he will be. We didn’t take him at Tycho, and we’ll take him somewhere else. He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time.” Rosenfeld looked down at his bulb, his body hunching a degree in submission. Filip had felt his father’s victory like it was his own. “Didn’t finish reading that book, did you?” Rosenfeld asked mildly.”

— James S.A. Corey

195. “It’s the problem with politics. Your enemies are often your allies. And vice versa.” Fred.”

— James S.A. Corey

196. “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

197. “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.” In.”

— James S.A. Corey

198. “It was like solving a complex math puzzle without any promise that an optimal solution existed.”

— James S.A. Corey

199. “So that was the story of who she was. The one who’d been too sensitive. Too weak.”

— James S.A. Corey

200. “The damage to her body, the wear and the weariness, were all products of conscious, determined choices made by a girl she hadn’t been in decades. She carried the weight of those decisions like a sack of bones.”

— James S.A. Corey