Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “It’s what’s missing in all of this,” Holden said. “It’s what let things get this bad. We don’t see each other as people. Even the feeds are always about weird things. Aberrations. All the times that a Belt station doesn’t have a riot? Those days aren’t news. It has to be an uprising or a protest or a system failure. Just being here, living a normal life? That’s not part of what the people on Earth or Mars hear about.”

— James S.A. Corey

402. “Hang on, little tomato”, he said. “We’re almost there.”

— James S.A. Corey

403. “Nothing was normal yet, and so nothing was strange.”

— James S.A. Corey

404. “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

405. “I hate the feeling that something vast and angry is scratching at the corners of reality and looking for a way to kill me.” “It’s only scary because it’s true.”

— James S.A. Corey

406. “I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me. One time and another in the years since, she’d taken comfort from that. Or warning. People fall in love, so maybe I will too. People get jobs, so maybe I will too. And people get sick. People have accidents. And now, she supposed, people are divided from their families by war and history. And so that could happen to me too.”

— James S.A. Corey

407. “Ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy.”

— James S.A. Corey

408. “And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round. What.”

— James S.A. Corey

409. “The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster,” she said. It was a truism of ecological biologists, and she said it the way a religious person might pray.”

— James S.A. Corey

410. “You know who talks about moral victories? The team that lost.”

— James S.A. Corey

411. “The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

413. “Right,” Holden said. “No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet. Show me how to make everyone better.”

— James S.A. Corey

414. “What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn’t be anyone else’s business.”

— James S.A. Corey

415. “Thing is, we’re humans. We’re tribal. More settled things are, the bigger your tribe is. All the people in your gang, or all the people in your country. All the ones on your planet. Then the churn comes, and the tribe gets small again.”

— James S.A. Corey

416. “We don’t want to get in a gunfight,” Holden warned Amos as they began moving again. “Yeah,” Amos said. “But if we’re in one anyway, it’ll be nice to have guns.”

— James S.A. Corey

417. “You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.”

— James S.A. Corey

418. “Sadness, fear, self-pity, self-doubt? They are inwardly focused. They keep you locked inside yourself. They’re useless. Anger is outwardly focused. Anger wants to take action. Anger is useful.”

— James S.A. Corey

419. “I have heard it said that how you spend your day is how you spend your life, and my days changed then.”

— James S.A. Corey

420. “Nature was beautiful, wherever she found it. And it was cruel. She didn’t know why she kept expecting humanity to be different.”

— James S.A. Corey

421. “All of the circumstances that made him your enemy will be gone. What’s the value in clinging to the hate?”

— James S.A. Corey

422. “It was an odd group of people to fall in love with, to adopt as your own kin and tribe, but there it was, and she wasn’t ever going back.”

— James S.A. Corey

423. “Thank you, but I don’t deserve any mercy.” “Of course you don’t. That’s why they call it mercy. If you deserve it, they call it justice.”

— James S.A. Corey

424. “We got a pilot yet?” she asked. “Alex Kamal is on the ready rotation today, so he’s our man. I kind of wish Valka had been up. He’s not the pilot Alex is, but he’s quieter, and my head hurts.” “I like Alex. He’s ebullient,” Naomi said. “I don’t know what ebullient means, but if it means Alex, it makes me tired.”

— James S.A. Corey

425. “The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot.”

— James S.A. Corey

426. “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

427. “Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled.”

— James S.A. Corey

428. “Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.”

— James S.A. Corey

429. “If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur.”

— James S.A. Corey

430. “Until death all is life.”

— James S.A. Corey

431. “We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.”

— James S.A. Corey

432. “Civilization has a built-in lag time. Just like light delay. We fly out here to this new place, and because we’re civilized, we think civilization comes with us.”

— James S.A. Corey

433. “It was always dangerous when the universe fell down in a pattern where the thing you wanted and the wise path were the same.”

— James S.A. Corey

434. “People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispered.”

— James S.A. Corey

435. “When everyone thinks the flood’s coming up, each little bit of normalcy is a sandbag.”

— James S.A. Corey

436. “Breaking things was always easier than building them up.”

— James S.A. Corey

437. “Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.”

— James S.A. Corey

438. “It’s probably full of vomit zombies,” Holden finally said. “Want to go see?” said Miller. “Oh yeah,” Holden said.”

— James S.A. Corey

439. “Nine books later and you’re still here, so this one’s for you.”

— James S.A. Corey

440. “Dammit,” Holden said after he’d killed the connection. “You ever get the sense that the universe is out to get you?” “Sometimes I get the sense that the universe is out to get you,” Amos said with a grin. “It’s fun to watch.”

— James S.A. Corey

441. “I have a ship with guns on it now, and the next time someone orders me to do something, I’m using them.”

— James S.A. Corey

442. “Dreams were fragile things to build with. Titanium and ceramic lasted longer.”

— James S.A. Corey

443. “We’re at the start of something here. We can’t let it slide. If it’s okay now, it’s okay forever. You plug a leak when it’s small, or you suffer when it’s big.”

— James S.A. Corey

444. “I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace.”

— James S.A. Corey

445. “That’s waiting for yesterday, sweetheart.”

— James S.A. Corey

446. “There was so much that they’d never seen or understood. They’d all just bumbled through, using the gates as shortcuts and hoping for the best. A species of beautiful idiots.”

— James S.A. Corey

447. “I think we got lucky. I think we were one little system in a vast, unreachable universe that was always on the edge of destroying itself, and now we have thirteen hundred chances to figure out how to live with each other. How to be gentle with each other. How to get it right. It’s better odds than we had.”

— James S.A. Corey

448. “Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.”

— James S.A. Corey

449. “We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are.”

— James S.A. Corey

450. “I took an ethics seminar with her as part of my postdoctorate work. There was a story we read about this beautiful, utopic land where everything was wonderful and enlightened and pleasant and good and just, except for one child who had to live in confusion and misery. One child, in exchange for paradise to everyone else.” “I know that one. Omelas.”

— James S.A. Corey