Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

303. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

305. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

307. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

309. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

313. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.”

— James S.A. Corey

320. “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

321. “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. So why try?”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

323. “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

324. “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

325. “Well, mostly I’m a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante’s killer? That’s kind of awesome.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

327. “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

328. “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

329. “There was justice to be had. He just couldn’t afford it.”

— James S.A. Corey

330. “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

331. “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

332. “Fred’s vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point.”

— James S.A. Corey

333. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

335. “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

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. “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

338. “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

339. “He’d been driven by his fear to become someone else. Someone who handled fear by turning it into violence.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

342. “He’s young. He still sleeps sometimes. It’s a weakness.”

— James S.A. Corey

343. “All this has happened because someone saw an opportunity that no one else did. They had the audacity to strike where no one else would even have considered an attack. That’s the power of audacity, and if a general is lucky and strong-minded, they can take that advantage and keep the enemy on their back foot forever.”

— James S.A. Corey

344. “You all right?” He smiled. “Why do you ask?” “Because you’re not all right,” she said.”

— James S.A. Corey

345. “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

346. “This isn’t about good guys and bad guys,” Anna said. “Yes, we’ve picked sides now, because some of the actions they are about to take will have serious consequences for us, and we’re going to try to stop them. But what you’re doing is demonizing them, making them the enemy. The problem with that is that once we’ve stopped them and they can’t hurt us anymore, they’re still demons. Still the enemy.”

— James S.A. Corey

347. “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

348. “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

349. “The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.”

— James S.A. Corey

350. “I actually read history. It’s like reading prophecy, you know.”

— James S.A. Corey