Top 500 James S.A. Corey Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

404. “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

405. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

407. “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

408. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

410. “Once upon a time there had been a Belter girl named Naomi Nagata, and now there was a woman. Even though the difference between the two had been created a day, an hour, a minute at a time, the Venn diagram of the two almost didn’t overlap. What could be cut away, she’d cut years ago. What remained did so in spite of her efforts. For the most part, she could work around them.”

— James S.A. Corey

411. “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

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

— 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. “Security trainees were driven by any number of things – the need for a job, an idealistic view of helping people, sometimes just a narcissistic love of violence.”

— James S.A. Corey

415. “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

416. “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

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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

421. “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

422. “Maybe, if they could find a way to be gentle, the stars would be better off with them.”

— James S.A. Corey

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

431. “A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are. I’m who I am, and it wasn’t what my wife wanted me to be, and somethin’ had to break.”

— James S.A. Corey

432. “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

433. “State violence was meant to be shocking. It was done to prove a point, and it would have been a pity for the sacrifice not to have its effect.”

— James S.A. Corey

434. “So she’d lied. That was interesting. She’d told him what he wanted to hear, and it wasn’t even because she wanted to protect him or keep him safe. It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion. And she was like them now. They’d eaten her.”

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

436. “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

437. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

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

— James S.A. Corey

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “He may be a god or he may be a devil, but he can’t stomach the idea of being just an unreasonably pretty man who stumbled into the right combination of charisma and opportunity.”

— James S.A. Corey

444. “Bull listened to the voices of the family he never saw except on a screen, the lives that didn’t intersect his own. The love he felt for them surprised him, and kept him from putting his own report in among them. It would only scare them, and they wouldn’t understand it.”

— James S.A. Corey

445. “People, building on the ruins of what had come before, just like they always did. So many things had been lost, but it was the missing people that hurt the most. Just like they always did.”

— James S.A. Corey

446. “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

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

— James S.A. Corey

448. “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

449. “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

450. “Fatalism had its dark attractions, after all. Hopelessness and despair could almost look restful.”

— James S.A. Corey