Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy...”

— James S.A. Corey

252. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

254. “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

255. “Bobbie ignored the macho posturing. Everyone dealt with pre-combat jitters in their own way. Bobbie preferred obsessive list making. But flexing and threats were good too.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

257. “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

258. “Change should be watched, moderated, and questioned. But that conservative view shouldn’t rein in progress or put a damper on hope.”

— James S.A. Corey

259. “You live in your own world, dear one.” “I do,” Arjun agreed, running his thumb across the hand terminal’s screen. He looked up. “You don’t mind, do you?” “I love you for it. Stay.”

— James S.A. Corey

260. “Oh, I’m not dying out here,” Amos said, and pointed toward the interior of the ship with his chin. “Worst-case scenario, I’m dying inside there.”

— James S.A. Corey

261. “He understood the flaw in that logic: if comforting them comforted him, maybe comforting him comforted them, and they could all drive the ship into a rock while they smiled at each other.”

— James S.A. Corey

262. “Yeah,” Chris said. “I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I’m an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I’m a hero.”

— James S.A. Corey

263. “It’s all fun and games till someone shoots back, Holden thought.”

— James S.A. Corey

264. “He looked like a kid who just realized he’d jumped in the deep end of the pool and was trying to figure out whether he should embarrass himself by shouting for help or drown with a little dignity.”

— James S.A. Corey

265. “Political favors are how I express affection,” she said.”

— James S.A. Corey

266. “Nothing like a little shared racism to build ties with the boss.”

— James S.A. Corey

267. “Well, that and a hundred or so gunships,” Havelock said. “From what I hear,” Miller said, “if you clap your hands and say you believe, they can’t shoot you.”

— James S.A. Corey

268. “We have expended two-thirds of our rail-gun ammunition,” the weapons tech announced. “Shall I maintain fire?” “Yes,” Drummer said. “Then start putting chairs in the launcher. We hit that thing until we’re down to pillows and beer.”

— James S.A. Corey

269. “The door to the primary power junction was reinforced. A red border was painted around the frame, with warnings in half a dozen languages that all meant Please be careful. There’s a lot of things in here that we’ll have to fix after they finish killing you.”

— James S.A. Corey

270. “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

271. “When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.”

— James S.A. Corey

272. “If Miller had brought him all this way just to let him die in an abandoned train car, it was the longest prank setup in history.”

— James S.A. Corey

273. “Mom,” Holden said. “Earthers and Belters can have kids just fine. We’re not a different species.”

— James S.A. Corey

274. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

276. “She sat at the dining table, a steaming mug of tea in front of her, a distant look in her eyes. Holden couldn’t tell if she was melancholy or solving a complex engineering problem in her head. Those looks were confusingly similar.”

— James S.A. Corey

277. “Duty isn’t a buffet where you pick what you want and ignore the rest.”

— James S.A. Corey

278. “Tell me everything it explains,” he said when he could remember how to speak. Being forced to move moist flaps of meat in order to form the words felt sensual and obscene.”

— James S.A. Corey

279. “Any meeting with Martian command is going to have to wait until after the situation on Ganymede is stabilized. Official diplomatic talks before then are only going to make it seem like we’ve accepted the new status quo.” That was Admiral Nguyen, youngest of the men present. Hawkish. Impressed with himself in the way that successful young men tended to be. General.”

— James S.A. Corey

280. “Hey,” she said. “Hey.” “So I have a thing.” “Is it a thing I can fix?” Holden asked. “Point me at the thing.”

— James S.A. Corey

281. “The best governments in history have been kings and emperors,” Duarte said. “The worst ones too. A philosopher-king can manage great things in his lifetime. And his grandchildren can squander it.”

— James S.A. Corey

282. “If this is what I get, this is what I get. Not a life without regrets, but none I can’t live with. None I can’t die with.”

— James S.A. Corey

283. “I care deeply about all the fine details,” she said, “only actually, I don’t. Sum it up.”

— James S.A. Corey

284. “What the Earthers had discovered is that when people have nothing else to do, they have babies.”

— James S.A. Corey

285. “It struck him, not for the first time, that confrontations were like a dance. Certain moves required certain responses, and most of it happened in the lower parts of the brain that language might not even be aware of.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

287. “You know,” he said, “you have a really weird relationship with treason.”

— James S.A. Corey

288. “Reputation never has very much to do with reality.”

— James S.A. Corey

289. “There aren’t any new starts,” Bobbie said. “All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it’d mean not having a history anymore. I don’t know how to do that.”

— James S.A. Corey

290. “Tilly screamed. Anna’s shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way.”

— James S.A. Corey

291. “Her disagreement was primarily with the level of glee over the destruction of the wicked that sometimes crept into the teachings.”

— James S.A. Corey

292. “Plan? My plan is to die in a ball of superheated plasma.”

— James S.A. Corey

293. “Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”

— James S.A. Corey

294. “The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.”

— James S.A. Corey

295. “Sometimes people knew when they were saying their last goodbyes, but not always. Not often. Most people’s last parting of ways were so small, the people involved didn’t even notice them.”

— James S.A. Corey

296. “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

297. “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

298. “But that was the way time worked. Too fast when you weren’t paying attention, and then slow as mud when you watched it.”

— James S.A. Corey

299. “Here is the problem, they said to themselves, and there is the solution. That it was drowned in innocent blood was as trivial as the font the reports were printed in. They had disconnected themselves from humanity. Shut off the cell clusters in their brains that made life besides their own sacred. Or valuable. Or worth saving. All it had cost them was every human connection.”

— James S.A. Corey

300. “Nothing that’ll kill us sounded good, but Holden felt a pang for his coffeemaker.”

— James S.A. Corey