James S. A. Corey Quotes

Familiarity might breed contempt, but Bobbie hadn’t much liked Soren right from the start.

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

“No, that was real,” Miller said. “Just a little reminder that we’re out of our depth here.”
“Didn’t need it. Was clear,” Jim said.

It also meant that their reaching out to the artifact had gotten it to reach back. Her experiment was working.
She’d expected success to feel less like fear.

Hell no," Jim said when they were alone in the suite. "Absolutely no. No fucking way, no. There have got to be a billion different ways to say no, and I'd still have to cycle through them a couple times to really express the depth of no on this one. Clarissa Mao? On the Roci? How is that anything but a massive load of let's-not-do-that?

History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.

Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.
A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there.
Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

Fatalism had its dark attractions, after all. Hopelessness and despair could almost look restful.

She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture.

The important thing is that we get good data. One person. Lots of people. All the same. But bad experimental design? That's what sin really is," Cortázar slurred. "That's not me either. Nature eats babies all the time.

What we're doing here is bigger than politics.
I know," he said. "I just keep hoping the politicians see it too.

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.

She wanted to believe. But she also knew better.

The universe is always stranger than you think.
It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.

I’m not sure if dying free is as attractive when it stops being rhetorical.