James S. A. Corey Quotes

Fashion never stopped. It was one of many things Naomi was pleased that age allowed her not to care about anymore.

Why aren't you doing that?
Do you want the real reason, or my justification?

“Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air.

We're the ones who followed the rules here. We came with science teams and a hard dome. We hired them to build our landing platform, and they killed us. We're the good guys here.
And the moral high ground is a lovely place," Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. "It won't stop a missile, though.

He was grandiose. He was ruthless. He was a genius at a couple of things and under the misapprehension that it meant he was smart about everything. But in his mind, he was doing the right thing.

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 is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.

Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.

“We regret the necessity of this action,” she said to everyone everywhere. “But in the cause of freedom, there can be no compromise.” That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.

Drummer had read somewhere that newsfeeds were where secular societies went to find out what cultural narratives were important and what could be ignored.

She had been a pawn in Holden’s chess game. And Holden had gotten her to the last rank and promoted her to a queen.

We knew that, though.
We suspected it.
Do we know it now?
We suspect it harder," Elvi said. "We're scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we're wrong.

Avasarala stretched her right leg, feeling the ache in it. It would be worse in the morning. Lifting weights was an argument against a benign God. As if that needed more evidence.

She felt like her soul was a handful of dice that were still rolling, and what came up would decide the shape that the rest of her life took.

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.

History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect.