James S.A. Corey Quotes

No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.

Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.

No rest for the wicked, no peace for the good.

You're the predator right up until you're prey.

If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.

Stars are better off without us.

Too many dots," Miller said. "Not enough lines.

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

Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas.

There's a right thing to do," Holden said. "You don't have a right thing, friend," Miller said. "You've got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.

Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.

No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Some things were secret even after you told them.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

There’s a dignity in consequences.

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

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.

War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?

Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing.

Because we can't just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation.

No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.

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

That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.

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

It was some of Solomon’s favorite music because it was dense and intellectually complicated and he wasn’t expected to dance to it.

Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp

I don’t kill children, ” she said. “Not even when it’s the right thing to do.

His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars.

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

God save us all from good-looking men.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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