Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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. “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

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. “When people get too comfortable, they get loose. Sloppy.”

— James S.A. Corey

259. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— 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. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

275. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

277. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

279. “All beautiful things should have just a little sorrow about them. Made them seem real.”

— James S.A. Corey

280. “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

281. “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

282. “The doors opened, and the first zombies appeared. Men and women, their eyes glassy and their muscles slack, stumbled out through the open doors. Miller had seen a documentary feed about hemorrhagic fevers as part of his training on Ceres Station. Their movements were the same: listless, driven, autonomic. Like rabid dogs whose minds had already been given over to their disease.”

— James S.A. Corey

283. “They don’t hate us,” Bobbie said, her voice tired. “They’re afraid of us.” “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

285. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

287. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

289. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

292. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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