James S. A. Corey Quotes

He lifted the gun.
“Wait!” Singh said. “Wait. Do you believe all that? About what killing me is supposed to achieve?”
“I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”

All right," Bobbie said. "New orders. Don't die until I say so.

It was a day with a lot of ways to die packed in it.

The hardest thing was to trust his own people to do their jobs well, but it was what he had to do. He wondered if the high consul suffered the same thing—knowing that all the critical action would be taken by others who were guided by his orders, but in conditions he could only guess at, and in places where his intervention, even if it were possible, could only muddy the waters. It was a subtle and terrible insight. The powerlessness of control.

You think he may be a triple agent?
It wouldn't be the first time something like that had happened. The one thing you know about someone who's willing to compromise his allies is that he's willing to compromise his allies.

Her heart was pounding. Her muscles ached. She’d just killed two of the enemy. There would always be a little something—that tug on her humanity that came from doing violence. There was a satisfaction too. It didn’t mean she was a good woman or a bad one. It meant she was a Marine.

'The predictable limits of a conceptual framework,'" Bobbie said. A phrase from her classroom on Olympus Mons. "It's always where to hit the enemy. Whoever they turn out to be. When I learned how to do things like this, we were thinking about Earthers and pirates.
Katria laughed. "When I taught myself how to do this, I was thinking of people like you. Strange how the wheel turns.

Ah! I see what you're doing," Alex said. "You're trying to make flying out to Charon and dodging radiation flares sound like a good idea. It's that whole 'I'll put a shitty idea next to a really shitty idea so the first one looks shiny by comparison' thing.

Every revolution needed its mad bombers, apparently.

The universe owed her a little slice of luck like that.

It’d be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a basket of fucked.

An invisible line in space, unmarked by anything more than what people believed about it. And that was enough.

Nothing degraded morale like the sense that the potential for excellence was being denied.

The high consul is a very wise, very thoughtful man," he said. "I have perfect faith that—
No. Stop. 'Perfect faith' really tells me everything I need to know," Holden said. "You think this is a gentle, bloodless conquest, don't you?
It is, to the degree that you allow it to be.
I was there for the war Duarte started to cover his tracks. I was there for the starving years afterward. Your empire's hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don't count.

So why do you hate us? If you don't mind my asking.
You personally? I don't. But this conquistador bullshit? It's true I don't think much of it.
Singh leaned back in his chair, cocked his head. "This is all a conversation about politics for you, then? It matters to you that much whose vision guides the government, no matter what that vision is?
Not that academic," Holden said. "I've spent a lot of years trying to get people to get along without anyone's boot being on anyone's neck. Your plan A is what I've spent a lifetime pushing against.
Do you really think we're so bad? Look at what we've done, how we've done it. We haven't opened fire on a single ship that didn't attack us first. In all of history, when has a conqueror been able to say that? We have embraced local rule. Any of the colony worlds that submits can make their own local government, keep their own local customs—
Unless they conflict with your rules.
Of course.
Holden sipped his coffee. "That's the thing. The people you're controlling don't have a voice in how you control them. As long as everyone's on the same page, things may be great, but when there's a question, you win. Right?
There has to be a way to come to a final decision.
No, there doesn't. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It's messy and undignified, but it's when we're at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there's just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.