Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “So that was the story of who she was. The one who’d been too sensitive. Too weak.”

— James S.A. Corey

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

211. “We’re outgunned and outplanned, and I don’t see how we win.”

— 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. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “Mark Watney, out of Mars.”

— James S.A. Corey

226. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

229. “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

230. “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

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

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

— James S.A. Corey

234. “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

235. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

238. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

240. “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

241. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey