James S. A. Corey Quotes

There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.

That's the problem with things you can't do twice," Naomi said. "You can't ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.
No. But you can say that if we don't do something different, it'll happen again. And again. And again, over and over until something changes the game.

Space is too fucking big. It's the same old story.
He'd guessed right. She just wanted to talk, so he let her. "What story?"
"Empire. Every empire grows until its reach exceeds its grasp. We started out fighting over who got the best branches in one tree. Then we climb down and fight over a few kilometers' worth of trees. Then someone starts riding horses, and you get empires of hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Ships open up empire expansion across the oceans. The Epstein drive gave us the outer planets..."
She trailed off and tapped out something on the comm panel. She didn't volunteer who she was sending messages to, and Holden didn't ask. When she was done, she said, "But the story is always the same. No matter how good your technology is, at some point you'll conquer territory that you can't hold on to."
"You're talking about the outer planets?"
"Not specifically," she said, her voice growing soft and thoughtful. "I'm talking about the entire fucking concept of empire. The Brits couldn't hold on to India or North America because why should people listen to a king who's six thousand kilometers away?

“Seems like the right tentacle ain’t keeping track of what the left tentacle’s up to,” Amos said.

Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.

The engineers groaned and shook their heads. Legal arguments were another phrase for bullshit to them.

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

They fought and worked and devised intricate plans to buy more time. Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.

The hardest thing was to trust his own people to do their jobs well, but it was what he had to do. He wondered if the high consul suffered the same thing—knowing that all the critical action would be taken by others who were guided by his orders, but in conditions he could only guess at, and in places where his intervention, even if it were possible, could only muddy the waters. It was a subtle and terrible insight. The powerlessness of control.

The mirror plummeting toward the surface of Ganymede—toward his greenhouse, his soybeans, his life’s work—hadn’t chosen anything. It was a victim of cause and effect, the same as everything else.

Sometimes when we make these distinctions, we’re really creating them more than describing anything that’s already there.

But before they could go anywhere, they needed a place to go and a plan that was more fleshed out than Don’t die.

Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.

There was a time, Prax knew, that the violence would have bothered him. Not the blood or bodies. He’d spent more than enough time doing dissections and even autonomous-limb vivisection to be able to wall off what he was seeing from any particular sense of visceral horror. But that it was something done in anger, that the men and women he’d just seen blown apart hadn’t donated their bodies or tissues, would have affected him once. The universe had taken that from him, and he couldn’t say now exactly when it had happened. Part of him was numb, and maybe it always would be. There was a feeling of loss in that, but it was intellectual.

Are you sure it was him?" Teresa asked.
Provable? No. Silly to assume anything different? Yes. At this point I'd need evidence that it wasn't Duarte before I'd entertain it seriously. I hear hoofbeats, I'm still thinking horses at this point.