Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

303. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

311. “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

312. “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

313. “Nothing that’ll kill us sounded good, but Holden felt a pang for his coffeemaker.”

— James S.A. Corey

314. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

320. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

324. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

333. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

335. “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

336. “It was intentional and inhuman. It was like seeing the face of God and finding no compassion there.”

— James S.A. Corey

337. “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

338. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

340. “I could kill you with my hands, Marcus thought, and it was enough to evoke the smile that etiquette called for.”

— 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. “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

343. “Only here on Earth, where food grew on its own, where air was just a by-product of random untended plants, where resources lay thick on the ground, could a person actually choose not to do anything at all. There was enough extra created by those who felt the need to work that the surplus could feed the rest. A world no longer of the haves and the have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.”

— James S.A. Corey

344. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

346. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

349. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey