Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Partners,” she said, and fired two rounds into his head.”

— James S.A. Corey

202. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

204. “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

205. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

213. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

215. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

229. “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

230. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

234. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

237. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

239. “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

240. “It was strange how nothing could change while everything did.”

— James S.A. Corey

241. “Then why do they act like they hate us?” David’s father said with something like triumph. “Because that’s what fear looks like when it needs someplace to go.”

— James S.A. Corey

242. “Burton’s misfortune was to be born where and when he was, in a city of scars and vice, in an age when the division in the popular mind was between living on government-funded basic support or having an actual profession and money of your own.”

— James S.A. Corey

243. “It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdalae, and sometimes they touched.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

245. “Don’t think about the odds,” Bobbie said. “Think about the stakes. Think how much we lose if we take the risk and it goes wrong.”

— James S.A. Corey

246. “Nothing with meat inside it could outrun metal and silicon.”

— James S.A. Corey

247. “What astounded me was that the cutting edge of human knowledge was so close. Before I educated myself, I assumed that there was a great depth of science, that every question of importance had been cataloged, studied, that all the answers were there, if only someone could query the datasets the right way. And for some things, that was true.”

— James S.A. Corey

248. “Maybe it was a cumulative process, like smoking cigarettes. One didn’t do much. Five didn’t do much more. Every emotion he’d shut down, every human contact he’d spurned, every love and friendship and moment of compassion from which he’d turned had taken him a degree away from himself.”

— James S.A. Corey

249. “No one really appreciated how much of security work was just trying to keep things under control for a few more minutes, giving everyone involved in the crisis a little time to think it all through.”

— James S.A. Corey

250. “Cells became molecules – countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that made the molecules gave up their space, and she was a breath. A mist. A tiny play of fields and interactions in a vacuum as perfect as space. She was a vibration in nothingness.”

— James S.A. Corey