James S. A. Corey Quotes

All the ways they wanted to help her, but never asked how she wanted to be helped.

She wanted to believe. But she also knew better.

The most effective lies, after all, convince the liar.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.

He had been desperate for a narrative, and now that I’d given him one, it seemed unlikely that he would see anything else.

I would rather be damned as naïve than willfully ignorant.

There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.

I was looking at the oak and recognizing the acorn.

It seemed like the kind of asserted reality—the willful decision to believe that people would act the way you preferred that they would—that posed a constant threat to those of us in research.

The second I saw those bastards coming down the street, I knew it was over for me. I'm dead. It's just a matter of time is all.
That's always true," Lydia said, her mind taken with other matters. "For everyone.

The several unexamined assumptions in the argument remained unexamined.

Two points defined a line, but three defined the playing field.

She understood on a deep, animal level that sex was like music or language. It could express anything. Love, yes. Or anger, or bitterness, or despair. It could be a way to grieve or a way to take revenge. It could be a weapon or a nightmare or a solace. Sex was meaningless, and so it could mean anything.

A liberal arts background was a hard thing to overcome, but she was doing great.

That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.