James S.A. Corey Quotes

She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk. There

We're not doing one of those things where you need me to ask you a bunch of questions so you can get comfortable talking about your feelings, are we?" Alex laughed. "That never works." "So let's not do it." On

The dead Martian had been affixed to the wall with a single-charge prospector's spike.

What about you?" Scarlet asked. "You have to enjoy the fear, too. Just a little?"
"Not the fear," Han said. "I just like being a little smarter than the next guy."
"That's all it is?"
"That, and I really hate paying taxes.

Well", Holden said, his voice grim, "we have a major problem. We're out of coffee."
"We still got beer," Amos said.
"Yes," Holden said. "But beer is not coffee.

Figure two-, three-hundred-kilometer-an-hour winds, lightning, torrential rains. You're far enough inland to avoid the three-kilometer-high tsunami." "Basic wrath of God package, minus drowning,

Boy, everybody is just a fucking pile of fun right now, Amos said loudly.

At a bit over two meters tall, she was only slightly above average height for a Martian male, but thanks in part to her Polynesian ancestry, she weighed in at over a hundred kilos at one g. None of it was fat, but her muscles seemed to get bigger every time she even walked through a weight room. As a marine, she trained all the time.

I don't kill children," she said. "Not even when it's the right thing to do.

Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that's left is the building.
[Ozymandias syndrome, anyone? Ed.]

Nothing better in the world than getting a job the day after your ass gets canned.

There aren't any new starts," Bobbie said. "All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it'd mean not having a history anymore. I don't know how to do that.

Like everything else humans built for space travel, it was designed to be efficient, not pretty.

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

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

But after a few decades, you come to a place where you realize that there's really no difference between trying and not trying. I still travel. I still talk to people. Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking. If someone is ready to accept Christ, it doesn't take much effort on my part to help them. If they aren't, no amount of hectoring them does any good.

God, save me from temperance," Tilly said. "You haven't seen a party till you get a group of Anglicans and Catholics trying to beat each other to the bottom of a bottle."
"Now, that's not nice, Mrs Fagan," Father Michel said. "I've never met an Anglican that could keep up with me.

And with the lower docking fees, Eros Station found other ways to soak money from its visitors: Casinos. Brothels. Shooting galleries. Vice in all its commercial forms found a home in Eros, its local economy blooming like a fungus fed by the desires of Belters.

Something like that," he said. "Do you attend church?" "Haven't in years," Miller said. "I was a Methodist when I was anything. What flavor are you selling?" The

Don't," Naomi said, letting him go, "pull your gun on anyone." "They have guns." "Guns plural. You have gun singular, which is why you will keep yours in your holster, or you'll do this by yourself." That's

Gah, Prax said, and curled up into a floating fetal ball.

You're cranky because you're tired," Amos said. "You got that I-have-to-save-everyone hangup, so I make it that you haven't slept in about two days. But listening to people bitch? Yeah, that's sorta your job. It's why you make the big money." "We make the same money." "Then I guess you're doing it for the fame and glory." "I hate you," Holden 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.

Strong believer in doing what needs to get done.

Intellectually, he knew that he was falling sunward, heading in from the Jovian system toward the Belt. In a week, the sun would be close to twice the size it was now, and it would still be insignificant. In a context of such immensity, of distances and speeds so far above any meaningful human experience, it seemed like nothing should matter. He should be agreeing that he hadn't been there when God made the mountains, whether it meant the ones on Earth or on Ganymede or somewhere farther out in the darkness. He was in a tiny metal-and-ceramic box that was exchanging matter for energy to throw a half dozen primates across a vacuum larger than millions of oceans. Compared to that, how could anything matter?

A bicycle?" Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. "Sure. They don't need fuel, they don't get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You're looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes are the way to go.

The old man was brilliant at looking somber and energetic at the same time. If he hadn't been the executive of the largest governing body in the history of the human race, he'd have made a killing promoting health drinks.

It's weird as tits on a bishop, but who knows if it means anything? They're

You know," he said, "you have a really weird relationship with treason.

Jesus, Captain, you look like shit.

All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always.

She was going to see a world in the aftermath of utter disaster, but she would still see it. And the state of nature was always recovering from the last disaster. "Stop,

But it is only a machine. It doesn't think. It follows instructions. If we learn how to alter that programming, then we become the architects of that change.

He's young. He still sleeps sometimes. It's a weakness.

The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos' experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.

History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster,

You've flown with us for twenty-five years, you like us, you've learned the patois. I bet you can order a beer and a hooker on any station in the Belt.

Cap," Amos said with a grin. "Anything that kills me has already killed everyone else. I was born to be the last man standing. You can count on it." The

What?" "You're very beautiful," Holden said. "I hope I tell you that often enough." "You do." "Then I hope I don't tell you so often it gets annoying." "You don't," she

If this isn't important, I will rip your throat open and piss down your lungs.

the devil has always lived in men when they reach too far, when they fail to ask if they should do something just because they can do it.

They're all fucking men," she said. "Excuse me?" Soren said. "The generals. They're all fucking men." "I thought Souther was the only - " "I don't mean that they all fuck men. I mean they're all men, the fuckers. How long has it been since a woman was in charge of the armed forces? Not since I came here. So instead, we wind up with another example of what happens to policy when there's too much testosterone in the room.

Amos found what I'm pretty sure was the most expensive hooker I've ever seen.

That seemed to be the human pattern - reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. In Holden's experience, humanity's drive out into the universe was maybe one part hunger for adventure and exploration to two parts just wanting to get the hell away from each other.

Mom," Holden said. "Earthers and Belters can have kids just fine. We're not a different species.

Generation ship," Holden said. "Something like that will give us the stars." "Or a lonely death on a long trip to nowhere," Miller replied. "You

Doesn't take much before we have to compromise ourselves, does it?" "Get born," Michio said, pulling

Yeah," Alex said in his drawling voice. "I mean, Naomi only got beat half to death. She can cut this Clarissa slack, it's no big deal. But the captain's girlfriend got hurt. He's the real victim here.

Every empire grows until its reach exceeds its grasp.

Bobbie ignored the macho posturing. Everyone dealt with pre-combat jitters in their own way. Bobbie preferred obsessive list making. But flexing and threats were good too.

It was strange how nothing could change while everything did.

Well, mostly I'm a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante's killer? That's kind of awesome.

the lizard living at the base of her spine

My hallucinations are of the alien mind control variety.

Cells became molecules - countless and complex and varied. The demarcation of one thing and another failed. There was only a community of molecules, shifting in a vast dance. And then the atoms that made the molecules gave up their space, and she was a breath. A mist. A tiny play of fields and interactions in a vacuum as perfect as space. She was a vibration in nothingness.

The mechanic had laid out two suits of their Martian-made light combat armour, a number of rifles and shotguns, and stacks of ammunition and explosives.
"What," Holden said, "is all this?"
"You said to gear up for the drop."
"I meant, like, underwear and toothbrushes.

Sure, boss," Havelock said. "Cool as November, smooth as China silk.

Say what you will about organized crime, at least it's organized.

Russian," she replied with a nod. "Born in Kimry. But a Muscovite for most of my adult life. North American?" "Montana. Farming collective." "I hear Montana is nice.

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 Earth, though. That's gotta be fucking embarrassing." "Unintended consequences," Naomi sighed. "Always with the unintended consequences.

It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.

Fred shook his head again, this time giving Holden the vaguely frightened look of a man who wanted to back slowly out of the room.

No one'll see us coming," Han said. "And everyone dies sometime."
"Not comforting."
"The alternative is we go spend a bunch of time waiting for you to come up with some other plan that doesn't work.

Some things were secret even after you told them.

He kind of wished he had a hat.

You know what I hate about you?" "My hat?" "That too," Holden said. "But mostly it's that I hate everything you say, but you're not always wrong.

I told you before that Johnson would be off the board, and he will be. We didn't take him at Tycho, and we'll take him somewhere else. He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time." Rosenfeld looked down at his bulb, his body hunching a degree in submission. Filip had felt his father's victory like it was his own. "Didn't finish reading that book, did you?" Rosenfeld asked mildly.

He'd never been to military pilot school, but he knew that years of training had compartmentalized Alex's brain into two halves: piloting problems and, secondarily, everything else.

Let me get this straight," he said. "You'll give me all the kingdoms of the Earth if I just bow down and do one act of worship for you?" Dresden

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.

His parents had raised him to believe that sex was something you did in private not because it was embarrassing, but because it was intimate.

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.

Basia floated next to the gunner's seat watching the hateful math spool out across the screen. She

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't come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity's failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.

Captain," Amos said with mock surprise. "Have you actually learned from your past? Is this a new thing you do now?

If the last few weeks had taught Han anything, it was that he didn't belong in the civilised part of her world. His place was in the bowels of the Falcon, or the pilot's seat.

The slow zone, based on the sensor data we're able to get, is approximately one million kilometers across." Holden pointed at the 3D representation on the screen behind him. "There are no visible stars, so the location of the zone is impossible to determine. The boundary is made up of one thousand three hundred and seventy-three individual rings evenly spaced into a sphere. So far, the only one we've been able to find that's 'open' is the one we came through. The fleets we traveled out with are still visible on the other side, though the Ring seems to distort visual and sensor data, making readings through it unreliable.

But that was the way time worked. Too fast when you weren't paying attention, and then slow as mud when you watched it.

War without end. Well,

I'll go be a revolutionary for a while, I guess." "Earthman's

We're not anarchists," she said. "We have goals. We want to end the Empire."
"And replace it with what?
"You know what," Scarlet said. Her crossed arms matched his own. "Are you trying to make fun of me?"
"It was rhetorical. I've heard the speech, sweetheart. 'A glorious return to the Republic of old.' To a guy like me, a new boss is still a boss.

Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks.

Everything about the former colonial administrative offices made Holden sad. The drab, institutional green walls, the cluster of cubicles in the central workspace, the lack of windows or architectural flourishes. The Mormons had been planning to run the human race's first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your centuries-long voyage to build a human settlement around another star! Here's your cubicle. The space had been

The neighborhood was at the friction point between sleazy and respectable.

It's the basic obstacle of artificial ecosystems. In a normal evolutionary environment, there's enough diversity to cushion the system when something catastrophic happens. That's nature. Catastrophic things happen all the time. But nothing we can build has the depth. One thing goes wrong, and there's only a few compensatory pathways that can step in. They get overstressed. Fall out of balance. When the next one fails, there are even fewer paths, and then they're more stressed. 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 computationally impossible." Holden

We've survived it. It's a known quantity. I have a binder with nine hundred pages of analysis and contingency plans for conflict with Mars, including fourteen different scenarios about what we do if they develop an unexpected new technology. The binder for what we do if something comes up from Venus? It's three pages long, and it begins Step One: Find God. Errinwright

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

The thing Alex Kamal liked most about the long haul was how it changed the experience of time. The weeks - sometimes months - spent on the burn were like stepping out of history into some small, separate universe.

He's using you as his external, aftermarket conscience.

I can get you some stimulants if you'd like, but there's no coffee." "Right," Holden said. "No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet. Show me how to make everyone better.

They'd made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they'd hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified.

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.

Great men, they're not like you or me. They have other needs. Other rhythms. It's what sets them apart. But sometimes they go so far into the void we lose sight of them. They lose sight of us.

People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispered.

Do you believe in the concept of forgiveness? In the possibility of redemption? In the value of every human life, no matter how tainted or corrupted?" "Fuck no," Bull said. "I think it is entirely possible to go so far into the red you can't ever balance the books." "Sounds

Stop making me fall in love with you, Cap, we both know it can't go anywhere.

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

- it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out - One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. It is not conscious, though parts of it are. There are structures within it that were once separate organisms; aboriginal, evolved, and complex. It is designed to improvise, to use what is there and then move on. Good enough is good enough, and so the artifacts are ignored or adapted. The conscious parts try to make sense of the reaching out. Try to interpret it.

Yes, you're in charge. That makes me XO, and it's the XO's job to tell the captain when he's being an idiot. You're being an idiot, sir.

Boarding a ship was one of the riskiest maneuvers in naval combat. It was basically a race between the boarders rushing to the engine room and the collective will of those who had their fingers on the self-destruct button.