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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

204. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

206. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

209. “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

210. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

219. “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

220. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

228. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

230. “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

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

— 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. “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

236. “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

237. “Mark Watney, out of Mars.”

— James S.A. Corey

238. “Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.”

— James S.A. Corey

239. “The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous.”

— James S.A. Corey

240. “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

241. “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

242. “It didn’t blow up last time,” Han said. “Maybe it won’t blow up this time, either.”

— James S.A. Corey

243. “Dare to be as great as the people who love you mistakenly think you are.”

— James S.A. Corey

244. “He stretched, ate his last bite of fungal curds, drank the dregs of something not entirely unlike coffee, and headed out to keep peace in wartime.”

— James S.A. Corey

245. “No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.”

— James S.A. Corey

246. “Excitement and dread wore each other’s clothes, spoke in the same voice.”

— James S.A. Corey

247. “You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.”

— James S.A. Corey

248. “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

249. “It seems to me the better question is whether there’s any virtue in committing to a permanent and unexamined certainty.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey