Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

304. “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

305. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

324. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

330. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

341. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

343. “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

344. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

346. “He was in ruins, but it was okay, because he was dying.”

— James S.A. Corey

347. “Alex’s experience of real family – of blood relations – was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

349. “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

350. “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