James S.A. Corey Quotes

Alex took a high stool and ordered a whiskey. Little early in the day for celebration, the barkeep said as he poured. What’s the occasion? It turns out, Alex said, exaggerating his Mariner Valley draw...

Alex’s experience of real family—of blood relations—was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it.

Alien superweapons were used, Alex said, walking into the room, sleep-sweaty hair standing out from his skull in every direction. The laws of physics were altered, mistakes were made.

All of them do what they think is right, and tell themselves that they’re moral people with the strength to do the necessary things, however terrible they seem at the time. Every atrocity that has bee...

All through human history, being a moral person and not being pulled into the dramatics and misbehavior of others had caused intelligent people grief. Dawes

All through human history, being a moral person and not being pulled into the dramatics and misbehavior of others had caused intelligent people grief.

Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.

An unshakable faith in humanity. It’s true, he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.

And I understand you’ve got a few after-market add-ons — Keel-mounted rail gun, Alex said with a grin. — that scream of overcompensating for tiny, tiny penises, but might prove useful. The

And even then, she hadn’t wanted to die. She’d just wanted it to be over. To be free of it all. For the pain and guilt to be over. And the feeling of being trapped. She might have been able to stand a...

And for a moment, he was tempted. In that hesitation between drawing breath and speaking, part of him wondered what would happen if he shed the patterns of history and spoke about himself as a man, ab...

And that’s the point I keep trying to make with her, my friend. In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.

And the moral high ground is a lovely place, Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. It won’t stop a missile, though. It

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 B...

Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked 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 wa...

Annie, Tilly said. If I wanted to suck vile fluids out of a flaccid and indifferent tube, I'd have stayed on Earth with my husband.

Any meeting with Martian command is going to have to wait until after the situation on Ganymede is stabilized. Official diplomatic talks before then are only going to make it seem like we’ve accepted...

Anyone can kill a planet from orbit, Holden replied. You don’t even need bombs. Just push anvils out the airlock. That thing out there could kill… Shit. Anything.

Anyone who had not had his determination, ruthlessness, and luck deserved pretty much whatever shit he handed to them.

As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way. She