Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

211. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

213. “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

214. “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

215. “Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

217. “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

218. “Here’s the thing,” Amos said. “If you did go in there, you might feel like you had to do something. And then I might feel like I had to do something. And then we’d all be doing things, and we’d all wind up having a worse day, just in general.”

— James S.A. Corey

219. “How many times can you get yourself massively irradiated before it catches up with you?” “At least once more?”

— James S.A. Corey

220. “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

221. “The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.”

— James S.A. Corey

222. “It takes something to stand out a little, and you can’t swing a dead cat on Ganymede without hitting five botany PhDs.”

— James S.A. Corey

223. “He wore his age like a statement that fighting the ravages of time and mortality was beneath his notice.”

— James S.A. Corey

224. “That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.”

— James S.A. Corey

225. “Looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were.”

— James S.A. Corey

226. “We’re back up and commencing burn in thirty seconds unless someone says otherwise. Everybody get ready to weigh something.”

— James S.A. Corey

227. “Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they were an apocalyptic cratered landscape crawling with horrors. That’s what the Earth was. A shining jewel from space, up close a blasted landscape covered with mites living by devouring the dying. “One ticket to New York,” he said to the automated kiosk.”

— James S.A. Corey

228. “Maybe one sad detective pulling a nuclear weapon on a wagon would slip through their defenses.”

— James S.A. Corey

229. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

231. “And what is civilization if it ain’t people talking over a goddamned beer?”

— James S.A. Corey

232. “And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though.”

— James S.A. Corey

233. “His enthusiasm was exhausting and charming at the same time. He wanted to impress her, so she resolved to be impressed. It was a small enough thing to give someone.”

— James S.A. Corey

234. “I’m not sure dying free is as attractive when it stops being rhetorical.”

— James S.A. Corey

235. “I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.”

— James S.A. Corey

236. “The thing Alex Kamal liked most about the long haul was how it changed the experience of time. The weeks – sometimes months – spent on the burn were like stepping out of history into some small, separate universe.”

— James S.A. Corey

237. “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

238. “So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?” “Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.”

— James S.A. Corey

239. “My love is a pure love,” Alex said with a grin. “I wouldn’t sully it by actually, you know, doin’ anything about it.” “The kind poets write about, then.”

— James S.A. Corey

240. “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

241. “Your fancy alien train is broken?” “My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.”

— James S.A. Corey

242. “We may have to get clever before the next one shows up, but no matter what happens, we’ll keep firing until that thing is a cloud of complex molecules and regret.”

— James S.A. Corey

243. “Keel-mounted rail gun,” Alex said with a grin. “ – that scream of overcompensating for tiny, tiny penises, but might prove useful.”

— James S.A. Corey

244. “That seemed to be the human pattern – reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. In Holden’s experience, humanity’s drive out into the universe was maybe one part hunger for adventure and exploration to two parts just wanting to get the hell away from each other.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

246. “I don’t kill children,” she said. “Not even when it’s the right thing to do.”

— James S.A. Corey

247. “You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”

— James S.A. Corey

248. “Situations change and clinging too tightly to what came before kills you.”

— James S.A. Corey

249. “Tribalism was an irrational position, and it was impossible to defeat an irrational position with a rational argument.”

— James S.A. Corey

250. “Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy...”

— James S.A. Corey