James S. A. Corey Quotes

Put a dozen people in front of their cameras, and you’d wind up with thirteen opinions.

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

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

See if there's anyone out there with a plan, or if we're going to have to make one up on our own.
We can do that," Amos said. "Shouldn't be hard.
You sure?" Alex said. "This is Medina Station under occupation by a bunch of splinter Martian military expats. It's not Baltimore.
Amos' smile was as placid as always. "Everywhere's Baltimore.

A brig had rules. It had expectations. You were in a brig until your lawyer or union rep came to talk to you. There would be hearings. If it went badly, there was prison. One thing followed another, and everyone called it justice, even when they all knew it was an approximation at best.

Everyone spies on everyone, Camina. Let’s not pretend to be outraged at water for being wet.

All the food chemists in the system will never do better than evolution at making a decent tea leaf.

“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.

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.

I mean, I’m all for forgiveness and bygones being bygones, but it’s easier to stomach that after the assholes are all dead.”

She couldn’t beat sense into a stone. Not even when it seemed fun to try.

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

The question wasn’t whether moving psychoactive alien seedpods between worlds was a good idea so much as whether someone was going to lose face in front of a committee meeting. Thus were the great decisions of history made.

Collaboration with the dead left questions that could never be answered.

The imperial view, a history professor at the Naval Academy once said, is the long view. Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that’s left is the building.