James S. A. Corey Quotes

It was a day with a lot of ways to die packed in it.

God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.

What scares me, Mose. It isn't fucking it up and dying. What if we fuck up, but we don't die. What if we fuck it all up and live? We're at the end of something, sure. Maybe we're at the beginning of something too. Maybe we make a whole new world. A whole new planet like Earth used to be. Hundreds of generations. Billions of people, that all start here. And we fuck it up for them.
I don't understand.
What if we just go on like people always have? The same bullshit. Give the same bullies and liars power like we did before. Cut all the same corners. Put up with all the same hypocrites. Make everything here into more of the shit that got us here. That seems worse. For me? That's worse.

We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.

A decent idea now is way better than a brilliant plan when it’s too late.

I'm getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn't seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they'd never do if they were really thinking about it.

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.

Pacifism only works when your enemy has a conscience.

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.

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

Right," Holden said. "No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet.

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.

She didn’t care. Not caring was how she got through the day.

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.

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.