Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Whoever screws up last loses. Whoever screws up second to last wins. That’s what war is.”

— James S.A. Corey

163. “I’m as surprised as you are,” Avasarala said. “Though I feel like I shouldn’t be. I actually read history. It’s like reading prophecy, you know.”

— James S.A. Corey

164. “There was a woman I knew. Long time. She used to say you can’t judge anyone by what they say. You have to watch what they do.” “She said that.” “I recognize the irony.”

— James S.A. Corey

165. “No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.”

— James S.A. Corey

166. “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

167. “Holden shot him in the throat. Somewhere in his brain stem, Detective Miller nodded in approval.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

169. “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

170. “Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been. Miller’s.”

— James S.A. Corey

171. “Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don’t count.”

— James S.A. Corey

172. “I mean, weird, dead alien technology with effects we don’t understand sweeping whole ships away without leaving a trace or explanation. That’s probably safe to play with, right?”

— James S.A. Corey

173. “It had been a failure, but it was a failure he understood, and that made it a victory.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

175. “Baltimore was Earth writ small, crowded and bored. Its citizens were caught between the dismal life of basic and the barriers of class, race, and opportunity, vicious competition and limited resources, that kept all but the most driven from a profession and actual currency.”

— James S.A. Corey

176. “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

177. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

180. “If the universe needs a knife, it makes a knife,” Josep said with a shrug. “If it needs a pirate queen, it makes Michio Pa.”

— James S.A. Corey

181. “And even then, she hadn’t wanted to die. She’d just wanted it to be over. To be free of it all. For the pain and guilt to be over. And the feeling of being trapped. She might have been able to stand all the rest of it, but not the sense of being caught.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

183. “So are you conscious?” The alien robot – the skin the Miller construct was using – shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. “Don’t know. Seems like I’m acing my Turing test, though.”

— James S.A. Corey

184. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

186. “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

187. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

190. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

192. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

195. “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

196. “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

197. “Yes, you’re in charge. That makes me XO, and it’s the XO’s job to tell the captain when he’s being an idiot. You’re being an idiot, sir.”

— James S.A. Corey

198. “The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead.”

— James S.A. Corey

199. “It’s not that bad. Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random. Absurd. If it’s all an enemy plot, at least there’s someone calling the shots.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey