James S. A. Corey Quotes

As an old drill sergeant had told her, pain is the warrior’s friend. Pain reminds you that you aren’t dead yet.

Time healed all wounds, but it didn’t erase the scars so much as decorate them.

Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter. Or at least not the way she’d thought they did.

Some things were secret even after you told them.

Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.

If wars began with rage, they ended with exhaustion.

She’d ended with I’ll do whatever I can, but you might have to make do with being avenged.

Hey," Holden said. "Do you know what Planck's constant is?
Six point six two six plus change times ten to the negative thirty-fourth meters squared kilos per second?
Sure, why not," Holden said, raising one finger. "But do you know why it's that and not six point seven whatever the rest of it was?
Naomi shook her head.
Neither does anyone else. They still call it science. Most of what we know isn't why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that's going to happen. That's what you've got. Enough to predict. And if you think you're right, then I do too. So let's do this.

Dying's not an art project.
Maybe it should be.

An unshakable faith in humanity.
It's true," he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. "Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.

Josep grunted. “Could be prophecy.”
“Could be that the universe doesn’t give a shit about us or anything we do and your mystic bullshit’s just a way we try to pretend otherwise.”

The universe was filled with mysteries and beauty and awe, and all that they could manage to do with it was this. Chase each other down and see who was the faster draw.

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.

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.

It was the widest concerted attack ever. Hundreds of ships on at least four sides. Dozens of stations, millions of lives.
Among the stars, it didn’t stand out.