James S. A. Corey Quotes

You familiar with the land rush in North America?
Yeah," Holden said, then took a sip of Fred's coffee. It was delicious. Earth grown, and rich. The privileges of rank. "I got your covered wagon reference. I grew up in Montana, you know. That frontier shit is still the story the people there tell about themselves.
So you know that the mythology of manifest destiny hides a lot of tragedy. Many of those covered wagons never made it. And more than a few of the people who did wound up as cheap labor for the railroads, mines, and rich farmers." Holden drank his coffee and watched the ship construction. "Not to mention all the people who were living there before the covered wagons showed up and gave everyone a nifty new plague.

That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.

She isn’t stupid, but she’s learning to fake it.

They say revenge is empty.
This is my first try at it," Holden said. "Forgive me if my opinions on it are fairly unformed.

But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them.

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

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.

There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair.

From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.

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

There were a lot of holes in that logic that he carefully avoided thinking about.

It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.

Still. Maybe some good can come out of it.
I admire your psychotic optimism.

I hate that it breaks down that way. Your side and mine. One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.

You can order the sun to come up if you time it right.