James S. A. Corey Quotes

That man could take a visitation from God with thirty underdressed angels announcing that sex was okay after all and make it seem vaguely depressing.

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

Stop," Holden said. "I don't care. I don't want to hear any more of your stories about how being a cop makes you wiser and deeper and able to face the truth about humanity. As far as I can tell, all it did was break you. Okay?
Yeah, okay.
Dresden and his Protogen buddies thought they could choose who lives and who dies. That sound familiar? And don't tell me it's different this time, because everyone says that, every time. And it's not.

Never knew if you had any luck left unless you pushed it.

Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.

You think you know what I am, she thought, but all you’ve got is stories.

If we’re not willing to win the fight, I’m not sure what we’re doing in the cage.

Djuna had stopped letting him watch the local newsfeeds at breakfast on the weekends. Too many stories about bodies being found in unfortunate conditions. Too many missing people, too many espionage claims, too many reminders from the still-official security apparatus that Pinkwater was an unaffiliated corporate entity with no political litmus tests and only the safety and well-being of the citizens of Ganymede at heart. The sorts of things people said because they weren’t true.

People trust what they already know. Having a new high consul would be difficult under any circumstances, but it would be less difficult if there were a story with it. A succession. I want to train you to be that, if—God forbid—something happened to me.
But why should I be good at it just because you were?" Teresa said. "There's no reason to think that. That's dumb.
It is," her father said. "But it's a mistake people have made all through history.

A liberal arts background was a hard thing to overcome, but she was doing great.

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.

Some things stayed secrets even when you told them.

Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same little corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across what was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were trivial. There was a lot more nothing than something.

Easy to make rules," Emma said. "Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it's the person's fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that's worth shit, we've done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they'd work perfectly if it were only a different species.
You sound like someone I know," Naomi said.
I'll die for that," Emma said. "I'll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.

I was looking at the oak and recognizing the acorn.