James S. A. Corey

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

"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."

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

"“I feel stupid,” she said. “I really thought we were a scientific mission.” “Aren’t we?” She pointed one thumb toward the monitor. “That’s not science. ‘Light shit on fire and see what happens’ isn’t science. This is throwing dynamite into a pond to see if any fish float to the top.” “So…natural philosophy?” “Military bullshit. Solving every problem by trying to blow it up.”"

"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."

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

"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’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.”"

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

"Naomi shook her head once, tightly, and held on to her anger like it was a vaccine against something worse."

"“The important thing is that we get good data. One person. Lots of people. All the same. But bad experimental design? That’s what sin really is,” Cortázar slurred. “That’s not me either. Nature eats babies all the time.”"

"“Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.” “You sound like someone I know,” Naomi said. “I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy.”"

"The bar was worse than shitty. Shitty had character. The place was generic. Fake stone meant to echo a tunnel on Ceres or Pallas marked with graffiti to make it look edgy until you noticed that the pattern of it repeated every couple meters. The appearance of counterculture as churned out by a corporate designer."

"“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.”"

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

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"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."

"Pacifism only works when your enemy has a conscience."

"It was like a Chihuahua threatening an office building."

"That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late."

"“I don’t know what the win look like.” “Well, for me, it looks like dying with the knowledge that humanity’s a little bit better off than it would have been if I’d never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me. That’s got to be enough.”"

"But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised. And the price was your soul."

"“How to achieve a more robust homeostasis. Just because it’s difficult to do doesn’t make the principal science unsolvable.” “So not unnatural at all,” Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor’s glass. “Meaningless term,” Cortázar said. “Humans arose inside nature. We’re natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.” “So if we get to a place that we can all live forever, that’s not unnatural? Holden sounded genuinely curious. Cortázar leaned in toward the prisoner, gesturing with his left hand while he swirled his glass in his right. “The only limits on us are what we can do. It’s perfectly natural to seek personal benefit. It’s perfectly natural to give advantages to your own offspring and withhold them from others. It’s perfectly natural to kill your enemies. That’s not even outlier behavior. That’s all in the middle of the bell curve all the time.”"

"“Sorry,” Bobby said…“I’m pissed at you right now and it’s not your fault.” “What can I stop not doin’ so it ain’t my fault anymore?”"

"What you’re really doing is trying to win back what you’ve lost by going all in. It’s shitty poker, and even worse as a battle strategy."

"“We’re all here for our own reasons,” Naomi said. “What they are isn’t as important as the fact that we came.” “True,” Emma said. Naomi laughed, and it was a hard, bitter sound. “Anyway, I spent too much time already with people telling me they’d shoot me if I didn’t do what they said. That tank’s empty for this lifetime.” “May it never refill,” Emma said."

"Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook."

"“When we get out,” she said. “Not if. When. We’re going to need a plan. If every ship just bolts off on its own, we’ll lose contact. They shouldn’t know where we went, but we should. At the very least, we should have a record of who went where. This every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all shit’s romantic, but we have to plan for something past just this.”"

"“We’ll get him,” Alex said. “We’ll always get him back.” “Sure we will. Until the time we don’t,” she said. “It’s like this for everyone. There’s always going to be a last time, eventually.”"

"“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.”"

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

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

"Every revolution needed its mad bombers, apparently."

"“‘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.”"

"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."

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

"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.”"

"The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"“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.”"

"Routine was what kept the darkness at bay, when anything did."

"Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay."

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