James S. A. Corey Quotes

Teresa seemed older than adolescent Jim had been, both more knowledgeable about the universe and angrier with it. Maybe the two went hand in hand.

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

And if there was one thing that her decades in academic science had drilled into her consciousness, it was that power meant policy.

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.

She had been a pawn in Holden’s chess game. And Holden had gotten her to the last rank and promoted her to a queen.

Elvi spent the hours before dawn watching the feeds. As soon as the violence ended, even before the wounded and the dead were sorted, the stories began taking shape. The differences between the state newsfeeds and the security reports Elvi saw in the aftermath made it sound like there had been two different battles.

Holden’s a decent person. Decent people have trouble with murdering children.

She’d been a different girl then. He’d been a different man. She missed both of them.

No one asked after Dr. Cortázar. That, Teresa had come to understand, was one of the unwritten rules. When someone disappears, don’t ask why.

The chime rang, calling them all to the dining room like the most privileged cattle in the universe.

That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.

It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion.

It was the single central argument that the universe had made to her through her whole life, and she was only now seeing it clearly: Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.

Nature was beautiful, wherever she found it. And it was cruel. She didn’t know why she kept expecting humanity to be different. Why she pretended the same rules that applied to mountain lions and parasitic wasps didn’t also constrain her. Red in tooth and claw, and at every level. In the Bible, even angels murdered humanity’s babies when God asked them to.

All the numberless different solutions that evolution had come up with under all the different stars, and all responding—more or less—to the same pressures. Eyes on every world. Mouths near the sense organs, because things with feeding coordination did better than things without.