Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “It was strange how nothing could change while everything did.”

— James S.A. Corey

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Amos Burton was a tall, stocky, pale-skinned man with an amiable smile, an unpleasant past, and a talent for cheerful violence. He left Baltimore to its dynamic balance of crime and law, exotics and mundanity, love and emptiness. The number of people who knew him and loved him could be counted on one hand and leave most of the fingers spare, and when he was gone, the city went on without him as if he had never been.”

— James S.A. Corey

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— 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. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “Mark Watney, out of Mars.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

269. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

271. “It was possible she was hurling her prayers at a cold and unfeeling universe that didn’t hear them, but that wasn’t how it felt. Science had given mankind many gifts, and she valued it. But the one important thing it had taken away was the value of subjective, personal experience. That had been replaced with the idea that only measurable and testable concepts had value. But humans didn’t work that way, and Anna suspected the universe didn’t either.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

273. “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

274. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

278. “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

279. “Yeah, okay. That’s just self-serving enough I believe it,” he said. “Let’s get settled in.”

— James S.A. Corey

280. “And how are you doing?” He didn’t ask because he needed an answer. He asked because he needed her to know the answer mattered to him.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

283. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

285. “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

286. “All through human history, being a moral person and not being pulled into the dramatics and misbehavior of others had caused intelligent people grief. Dawes.”

— James S.A. Corey

287. “Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

289. “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.”

— James S.A. Corey

290. “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

291. “Conspiracy theories come up whenever people feel like the universe is too random.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

293. “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

294. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

296. “She liked the analogy not because it was accurate, but because it was evocative. That was what made analogies useful.”

— James S.A. Corey

297. “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

298. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey