James S.A. Corey Quotes

Here’s the thing, Amos said. If you did go in there, you might feel like you had to do something. And then I might feel like I had to do something. And then we’d all be doing things, and we’d all wind...

Hey, Alex said, his voice thoughtful. If we made those nukes stop listening, that means we can’t shut ’em down, right? Wonder where Fred’s going to drop those. Hell if I know, Amos said. Just disarmed...

Hey, she said. Hey. So I have a thing. Is it a thing I can fix? Holden asked. Point me at the thing.

He’d seen unequivocally that the chaos he’d dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-...

His first lover—Diane Redstone, her name was—had a phrase for moments like this. Nice woods, she’d say, and then get up out of their bed and go to work. He hadn’t understood where the saying came from...

History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.

Human violence as a kind of fractal—self-similar on all scales from bar fight to system-wide war. The buildup of insults and lost face that swelled over the course of an evening or a century. The shov...

Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’...

Humanity hadn’t changed, but it had. The venality and the nobility, the cruelty and the grace. They were all still there. It was just the particulars he felt shifting away from under him.

Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to h...

Husband and wife seems like a less interesting and committed relationship than Holden and Naomi

I actually read history. It’s like reading prophecy, you know.

I believe there is a dignity in consequences, Captain. I think there’s a kind of truth in them, and I try to cultivate a profound respect for truth.

I can’t fight pirates without coffee.

I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things.

In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it...

It was all going to hell. The pirate casts from the OPA calling for war. The burgeoning guerrilla actions. All of it. The time was coming that Mars wasn’t going to ignore them anymore. And when Mars t...

It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdal...

It was, Elvi thought, like finding a sea turtle who thoroughly understood Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but didn’t have any sea-turtley application for it.

It’s a simple complex system. That’s the technical name for it. Because it’s simple, it’s prone to cascades, and because it’s complex, you can’t predict what’s going to fail. Or how. It’s computationa...