Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

253. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That’d be enough.”

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

281. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

284. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

290. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

292. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

294. “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

295. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

297. “Five thick-necked men in riot gear were waving people on. Two of them were pointing guns at the crowd. Miller was more than half tempted to go up and slap the little idiots. Pointing guns at people was a lousy way to avoid panic.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

299. “That Holden is up to something? Have you met that guy? He’s never done anything secretly in his life.”

— James S.A. Corey

300. “I wouldn’t want people to judge me by what I did in my twenties.”

— James S.A. Corey