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

302. “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

303. “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

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. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

307. “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

308. “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

309. “Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air.”

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

— James S.A. Corey

312. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

314. “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

315. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

317. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

325. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

327. “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

328. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

330. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

333. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

345. “Tilly screamed. Anna’s shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem?”

— James S.A. Corey

346. “When people don’t know anything,” Amos said, “they love having meetings to talk about it.”

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey