James S. A. Corey Quotes

Primary mission is fucked, but secondary is a win.
A moral victory, I guess," Bobbie sighed.
You know who talks about moral victories?" Jillian asked as she floated out of the room. "The team that lost.

That was somewhere between a guess and a metaphor, but it helped her to think about it.

People trust what they already know. Having a new high consul would be difficult under any circumstances, but it would be less difficult if there were a story with it. A succession. I want to train you to be that, if—God forbid—something happened to me.
But why should I be good at it just because you were?" Teresa said. "There's no reason to think that. That's dumb.
It is," her father said. "But it's a mistake people have made all through history.

In a fight like this, unless you’re willing to lose everything to win, you lose it all by losing.

It was like a Chihuahua threatening an office building.

Alex worried about that. Jillian was mean as a snake. When he’d told Bobbie that, she’d responded, I just make sure she never runs out of mice. He still didn’t know quite what that meant.

There had to have been a moment when this had become the new normal.

Pacifism only works when your enemy has a conscience.

The universe wasn’t just stranger than you knew, it was stranger than you could know.

The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.

You're not picking a fight with the things that made the protomolecule. You're picking a fight with whatever killed them. Orders of magnitude above the things that were orders of magnitude above us. You've got to know this is going to escalate if we keep using these technologies.
We were always going to keep using these technologies. That was inevitable the moment we opened the gates," Duarte said. "If you've studied any history at all, you know that. Never in human history have we discovered something useful and then chosen not to use it.

Everything changed, and it went right on changing. A terrible thought when things were good, a comforting one now. Whatever happened, she could be certain that things wouldn’t stay the way they were now. And if she stayed smart and clever and lucky, she’d be able to affect how the next change came. Or take advantage of it.

The founding impulse of Freehold is sticking it to the government.
Loses some of its shine after you get elected.

The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten.

It's the reward of old age," Avasarala said. "You live long enough, and you can watch everything you worked for become irrelevant.
You're not selling it," Drummer said.
Fuck you, then. Die young. See if I care.