James S. A. Corey Quotes

“Thank you for your time, Doctor. My door is always open to you.”
It was, she thought, an ironic way to tell her to leave.

Governments exist on confidence. Not on liberty. Not on righteousness. Not on force. They exist because people believe that they do. Because they don’t ask questions.

“Thanks for everything,” she said to the universe, as if it had been at the host of a particularly good party that was just winding down.

This was stupid.
It was worse that stupid. It was dishonest.

I’m going to go obsessively run diagnostics on systems I know are solid so I can feel like I have control of something.

Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.

That’s what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.

It had seemed like a kind of magnanimity at the time. It looked more like necessity now.

Fashion never stopped. It was one of many things Naomi was pleased that age allowed her not to care about anymore.

I'm sorry," Elvi said. "Wait. No. I'm actually not. Are you fucking crazy?

I’m not sure if dying free is as attractive when it stops being rhetorical.

She was rejoicing and mourning at the same time. And also feeling the deep unease that came from the reminder that being familiar wasn’t the same as being understood.

This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.

The woman herself looked down at hem from where she was etched in stone. It was probably just his imagination, but she seemed amused. Like now that she was dead and not actually responsible for fixing any of the vast and secret shit show that was human history, she finally got the joke.

Duarte was a thoughtful, educated, civilized man and a murderer. He was charming and funny and a little melancholy and, as far as Holden could tell, completely unaware of his own monstrous ambition. Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it.