Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

355. “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

356. “In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be.”

— James S.A. Corey

357. “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

358. “The man he’d once been wasn’t a collection of personality traits. He was the things he knew, the desires of his heart, the skills he had.”

— James S.A. Corey

359. “Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.”

— James S.A. Corey

360. “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

361. “As soon as we get the place secure, I’ll get in touch,” Miller said. “Okay, but don’t take too long. If Thoth Station has a whorehouse left standing, I’m going to need help prying Amos out of it.”

— James S.A. Corey

362. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

364. “Well, you’ve got a full load of torpedoes and bullets, three Martian warships trailing you, one angry old lady in tea withdrawal, and a Martian Marine who could probably kill you with your own teeth. What do you do?”

— James S.A. Corey

365. “After dinner, Holden took a long, slow tour of his new ship. He opened every door, looked in every closet, turned on every panel, and read every readout. He stood in engineering next to the fusion reactor and closed his eyes, getting used to the almost subliminal vibration she made. If something ever went wrong with it, he wanted to feel it in his bones before any warning ever sounded.”

— James S.A. Corey

366. “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

367. “You killed Dresden,” Fred said. “That’s a problem.” “It needed to happen.” “I’m not sure it did,” Fred replied, but his voice was careful. Testing. Miller smiled, a little sadly. “That’s why it needed to happen,” he said. The small, coughing laugh told Miller that Fred understood him.”

— James S.A. Corey

368. “History was a cycle. Everything that had happened before, all the way back through the generations, would happen again.”

— James S.A. Corey

369. “We keep acting without thinking and you think the solution is to do it one more time. You have allied yourself with stupid, violent men, and you are trying to convince yourself that being stupid and violent will work. That makes you stupid too.”

— James S.A. Corey

370. “History was drenched in blood.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

372. “Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.”

— James S.A. Corey

373. “That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

375. “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...”

— James S.A. Corey

376. “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

377. “Shouldn’t let go of being educated,” he said. “Universe spent a lot of time telling you something. Now you’re second-guessing it. Maybe all those other things were getting you ready for this.” Something.”

— James S.A. Corey

378. “What I want is Ceres Station or Earth or Mars. You know what they have in New York? All-night diners with greasy food and crap coffee. I want to live on a world with all-night diners. And racetracks. And instant-delivery Thai food made from something I haven’t already eaten seven times in the last month.”

— James S.A. Corey

379. “We’re fine now,” Sanjrani said. “We’ll be fine for three years. Maybe three and a half. Then the recycling systems stop being able to meet demand. We won’t have infrastructure in place to fill the gaps. And then we’ll starve. Not just Earth. Not just Mars. The Belt too. And once we start, we’ll have no way to stop.” “All right,” Michio said. “How do we fix it?” “I don’t know,” Sanjrani said.”

— James S.A. Corey

380. “Everything changed, and it went right on changing. A terrible thought when things were good, a comforting one now. Whatever happened, she could be certain that things wouldn’t stay the way they were now. And if she stayed smart and clever and lucky, she’d be able to affect how the next change came. Or take advantage of it.”

— James S.A. Corey

381. “The ocean, just outside, seeped into everything. An olfactory reminder to everyone passing through the Ellis Island of the space age that Earth was absolutely unique to the human race. The birthplace of everything. The salt water flowing in everyone’s veins first pulled from the same oceans right outside the building. The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it’d take their water back without a thought.”

— James S.A. Corey

382. “The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it’d take their water back without a thought.”

— James S.A. Corey

383. “He looked at the cop. He’d known the man less than a day, didn’t trust him, and wasn’t sure he much liked him. And this was who he’d die with.”

— James S.A. Corey

384. “Captain,” Amos said with mock surprise. “Have you actually learned from your past? Is this a new thing you do now?”

— James S.A. Corey

385. “Things change,” Alex said. “And they don’t change back,” she.”

— James S.A. Corey

386. “A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.”

— James S.A. Corey

387. “You’re making a mistake, shithead,” Avasarala said, and dropped the connection.”

— James S.A. Corey

388. “Meditating deeply so that she could really, clearly experience being angry and lonesome and hurt and horror-struck never seemed as good as a strong gin and tonic and another hour of work.”

— James S.A. Corey

389. “The bartender – Chip – said, “Had a few too many of my margaritas?” “The first one was too many,” Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. “And calling that a margarita should be illegal.”

— James S.A. Corey

390. “People like us? We aren’t righteous. But we can pretend to be, if we want, and that’s almost the same as if it were true.”

— James S.A. Corey

391. “The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words – the life-changing ones – should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded just like everything else.”

— James S.A. Corey

392. “The sunset was a massive canvas of gold and orange, green and rose, gray and indigo and blue. It reminded him of beaches on the North American west coast, except there were no vendors clogging the place and no advertising drones muttering about the joys of commerce.”

— James S.A. Corey

393. “I love the period of rotation. Thirty hours. You can get in a full day’s work, stay up getting drunk at the saloon, and still get a full night’s sleep. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this back home.”

— James S.A. Corey

394. “Holden considered ordering her to button up her helmet, then shrugged. She was old enough to decide for herself the relative risks and rewards of eating during a battle.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

396. “Cioran, bureaucratic heart of the Empire. Or if not heart, kidney. Maybe small bowel.”

— James S.A. Corey

397. “You ever wondered why I leave as soon as anyone else shows up?” “I’m special?” “Yeah, I wouldn’t go that far.”

— James S.A. Corey

398. “Jim, they make these things not to be fiddled with. The civilian version of this device fuses itself into a solid lump of silicon if it thinks it’s being tampered with. Who knows what the military version of the fail-safe is? Drop the magnetic bottle in the reactor? Turn us into a supernova?”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

400. “Owning your own racing ship wasn’t even wealth. It was like speciation. It was conspicuous consumption befitting ancient Earth royalty, a pharaoh’s pyramid with a reaction drive.”

— James S.A. Corey