James S.A. Corey Quotes

You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.

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

She'd been attacked. Just after she came to the Belt. She was seeing that it didn't happen twice.""Attacked," Miller said, parsing the man's tone of voice. "Raped?""I didn't ask.

James S.A. Corey

A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it.

James S.A. Corey

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

Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective. Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out.

James S.A. Corey

If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'll still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She'd look up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She'd tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity that had put her there.

James S.A. Corey

You’re too old for fairy tales,” Baasen said.

James S.A. Corey

Intellectually he knows that the blood is being pressed to the back of his body, pooling in the back part of his cerebellum and flooding his kidneys. He hasn’t done enough medical work to know what that means, but it can’t be good.

James S.A. Corey

He almost blacks out again, but he’s not sure if it’s the stroke or the thrust gravity. He’s pretty sure driving blood pressure higher while having a stroke is considered poor form.

James S.A. Corey

On Mars, the joke went, a man’s hole was his castle where values of castle approached dorm room.

James S.A. Corey

You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.

James S.A. Corey

Some things were secret even after you told them.

James S.A. Corey

I'm sorry you lost the suit,' he said.She shrugged.'At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,' she said...

James S.A. Corey

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

Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodically changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they’d decided to start shooting each other too.Yes, very bad.

James S.A. Corey

He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the way up. Back then he'd assumed it was just learned behavior, the body adapting so it could get enough rest in an environment that never really had downtime. Now he wondered if those vets found the constant noise preferable. A way to keep their lost shipmates away. They probably went home after their twenty and never slept again.

James S.A. Corey

Aw, you goddammed bastards! They're shootin' him while he's down! Son of a bitch!"The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, "Suck on this, asshole."The ship vibrated for half a second, then paused before continuing toward the lock."Point defense cannons?" Holden asked."Summary roadside justice," Alex grunted back.

James S.A. Corey

The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.

James S.A. Corey

You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.

James S.A. Corey

The only right you have with anyone in life is to the right to walk away.

James S.A. Corey

It was a mating dance only slightly more dignified than presenting like a mandrill, but endearing in its own fashion.

James S.A. Corey

Io, this is Admiral Muhan of the Martian Congressional Republic Navy. You fire anything bigger than a bottle rocket and we will glass the whole fucking moon. Do you read me?

James S.A. Corey

You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.

James S.A. Corey

I’m a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do.

James S.A. Corey

Fayez whistled low. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.

James S.A. Corey

Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

James S.A. Corey

For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs.

James S.A. Corey

Either help or give up. Right now devil's advocate is just another name for asshole.

James S.A. Corey

Some things stayed secrets even when you told them.

James S.A. Corey

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

James S.A. Corey

Yeah," Chris said. "I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I'm an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I'm a hero.

James S.A. Corey

Well,” Han said with a sigh, “we’ve gone from no-plan to stupid-plan. That’s progress of a sort.

James S.A. Corey

That's what it's come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we'll be free.

James S.A. Corey

It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren't listening. In Holden's navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the Donnager, and three of them had made a conscious decision to do so. Holden promised himself that he'd never make fun of them again.

James S.A. Corey

Your fancy alien train is broken?""My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.”“You are a sad, bitter little man.

James S.A. Corey

He'd turned away from a life on basic to live in the stars, or if not the stars, at least the rocks that floated free in the night sky.

James S.A. Corey

This was especially true in some millennialist sects that filled their literature with paintings of Armageddon. Pictures of terrified people running away from some formless fiery doom that burned their world down behind them, while smug worshipers—of the correct religion, of course—watched from safety as God got with the smiting.

James S.A. Corey

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

The fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air.

James S.A. Corey

it felt like waking up over and over without falling sleep in between.

James S.A. Corey

The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in.

James S.A. Corey

We're all traitors now.” “Ha!” the old lady said. “Only if we lose.

James S.A. Corey

Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy....

James S.A. Corey

The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.

James S.A. Corey

But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.

James S.A. Corey

They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God’s chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit. This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help.

James S.A. Corey

A woman's voice ululated on the sound system, somewhere between an Islamic call to prayer and orgasm with a drumbeat.

James S.A. Corey

Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she'll be haunted by what might be behind it.

James S.A. Corey

Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?

James S.A. Corey

I mean, yes, I did ask that. But that’s not the part that you should be caring about right now. You lied to me. Your involvement with weaponizing the Protogen project is fully exposed, and that question is like asking what color Tuesday was. It’s meaningless.

James S.A. Corey

The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.

James S.A. Corey

By the time the Somnambulist had set her creaking bones to rest on their assigned landing pad, Holden had lost all patience with human stupidity.So, of course, it came out to meet him.

James S.A. Corey

If we accept the premise that we’re always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses… and tell a good story.

James S.A. Corey

Later," Amos said, "when you're wishing we had this stuff, I am going to merciless in my mockery. And then we'll die.

James S.A. Corey

Reputation never has very much to do with reality. 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.Chrisjen Avasarala

James S.A. Corey

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

God save us all from good-looking men.

James S.A. Corey

Partners,” she said, and fired two rounds into his head.

James S.A. Corey

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