Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

167. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

169. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

171. “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

172. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

175. “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

176. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

178. “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

179. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “History was a cycle. Everything that had happened before, all the way back through the generations, would happen again.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

191. “And for a moment, he was tempted. In that hesitation between drawing breath and speaking, part of him wondered what would happen if he shed the patterns of history and spoke about himself as a man, about the Joe Miller who he’d known briefly, about the responsibility they all shared to tear down the images they held of one another and find.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

193. “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

194. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

196. “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

197. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

199. “Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord,” she said as she did, “because this makes me very uncomfortable.”

— James S.A. Corey

200. “It was strange how a person could be so vitally important in your life, and yet you had nothing to say to them when they weren’t sharing the same air.”

— James S.A. Corey