James S. A. Corey Quotes

After a certain point, the past becomes irrelevant.

It was like a Chihuahua threatening an office building.

She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be.

Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?

The second I saw those bastards coming down the street, I knew it was over for me. I'm dead. It's just a matter of time is all.
That's always true," Lydia said, her mind taken with other matters. "For everyone.

Still. She had hoped. It never hurt to hope, except when it did.

It’d be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a basket of fucked.

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.

Time for more smiling lies. More veiled threats. More—and he used the word as an epithet—diplomacy.

“It’s reading as an incredibly strong magnetic field focused down to a narrow beam.”
“Is that possible?” the duty officer said, her voice small and tight.
“Only if you define ‘possible’ as things that have already happened,” Naomi said, not turning to look at her.

I feel stupid," she said. "I really thought we were a scientific mission.
Aren't we?
She pointed one thumb toward the monitor. "That's not science. 'Light shit on fire and see what happens' isn't science. This is throwing dynamite into a pond to see if any fish float to the top.
So…natural philosophy?
Military bullshit. Solving every problem by trying to blow it up.

It was beautiful at this distance. The cities nothing but firefly twinkles on the dark side. Where the sun struck the Earth, almost nothing man had made was visible from the lunar orbit. The planet looked clean, unspoiled.
It was a pretty lie.
Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they were an apocalyptic cratered landscape crawling with horrors. That’s what the Earth was. A shining jewel from space, up close a blasted landscape covered with mites living by devouring the dying.

Emily," Drummer said, "do you know the one thing I am absolutely sure won't fix any of our problems? Another committee.

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.

“Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.