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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

166. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

168. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

170. “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

171. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

177. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

180. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

182. “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

183. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

199. “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

200. “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