Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Reputation never has very much to do with reality.”

— James S.A. Corey

302. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

304. “It’s herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

306. “Miller caught the red-and-green border that meant either a priority message or an early Christmas card.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

308. “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

309. “And with all of the enemy’s citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don’t even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the Belt has rocks that will turn the surface of Mars into a molten sea.”

— James S.A. Corey

310. “Anyway, that’s not what I meant when I said Marco decides when he wins. You don’t understand how slippery he can be. Whatever happens, he’ll shift so it was his plan all along. If he were the last person alive, he’d say we needed the apocalypse and declare victory. It’s what he is.”

— James S.A. Corey

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “The second corpse sat up and then stood, clutching her belly. A man stepped into the frame, a gun in his hand, healing her by sucking the bullet from her guts. They argued, grew calm, parted peaceably.”

— James S.A. Corey

315. “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

316. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

319. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

321. “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

322. “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

323. “The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.”

— James S.A. Corey

324. “We’re back up and commencing burn in thirty seconds unless someone says otherwise. Everybody get ready to weigh something.”

— James S.A. Corey

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “Need help on your way out?” the guard asked. “Naw,” Amos replied and hoisted the box over one shoulder. “I’m good at leaving.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

332. “Been brooding the whole time?” she asked. “Some of it, yeah.” “Did it help?” “Nope.” “Right. Spring into action, then?” He nodded at the amber door alarm. “Not yet.” She glanced down. The override light flickered in her eyes like a candle flame. “Huh. All right. Brush teeth, pee, and spring into action?” “That’ll work,” he agreed, and hauled himself up out of the bed.”

— James S.A. Corey

333. “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

334. “It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.”

— James S.A. Corey

335. “Those kids? They’re illegal, but they don’t just vanish, not.”

— James S.A. Corey

336. “What are you going to do?” “The same thing as always. Try to keep civilization from blowing up while the children are in it.”

— James S.A. Corey

337. “She tapped the red dot on the map that was the Tempest. “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

— James S.A. Corey

338. “Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter.”

— James S.A. Corey

339. “Will you be back?” Lydia said. She hadn’t meant to, because she knew in her heart, in her bones, and deeper than that what the answer was. Timmy smiled at her for the last time. I take it back, she thought. Kill him. Kill the boy. Kill everyone else in the world. Shoot babies in the head and dance on their bodies. Any atrocity, any evil, is justified if it keeps you from leaving me.”

— James S.A. Corey

340. “It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren’t listening. In Holden’s navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the Donnager, and three of them had made a conscious decision to do so. Holden promised himself that he’d never make fun of them again.”

— James S.A. Corey

341. “It was normal to sacrifice animals. Rats, pigeons, pigs. Dogs. Chimpanzees. Biology had always suffered the cognitive push-pull of proving that humans were just another kind of animal while at the same time claiming to be morally different in kind.”

— James S.A. Corey

342. “Lopez reached into his pocket, took out a small packet of white lozenges, and popped one into his mouth. He didn’t offer one to Holden. Lopez’s pupils contracted to tiny points as he sucked the lozenge. Focus drugs. He’d be watching every tic of Holden’s face during questioning. Tough to lie to.”

— James S.A. Corey

343. “We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us.”

— James S.A. Corey

344. “Saying ‘no problem’ is a sure sign that everything is about to go terribly wrong,” Han said.”

— James S.A. Corey

345. “Did he kill anyone?” Erich asked. When neither guard answered, he said, “Then he’s still being polite.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

347. “The pachinko machines lit them blue and green and shrieked in artificial delight.”

— James S.A. Corey

348. “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.”

— James S.A. Corey

349. “But after a few decades, you come to a place where you realize that there’s really no difference between trying and not trying. I still travel. I still talk to people. Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking. If someone is ready to accept Christ, it doesn’t take much effort on my part to help them. If they aren’t, no amount of hectoring them does any good.”

— James S.A. Corey

350. “He had to restrain himself from stroking the stainless steel cover while it made gentle percolating noises.”

— James S.A. Corey