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

252. “Mark Watney, out of Mars.”

— James S.A. Corey

253. “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

254. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

256. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

258. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

267. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— 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. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

295. “The boys spoke in loud, angry voices about tyranny and freedom. The girls watched the boys strut. The ancient, animal story, the same whether it was on a spinning rock surrounded by hard vacuum or the stamp-sized chimpanzee preserves on Earth. Even in the Belt, youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakable conviction that for you, things would be different.”

— James S.A. Corey

296. “Things change, and they don’t change back.”

— James S.A. Corey

297. “It was a real book – onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

299. “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

300. “He kind of wished he had a hat.”

— James S.A. Corey