James S. A. Corey

"There was life out there. They had proof of it now. And the proof came in the shape of a weapon, so what did that tell him?"

"Holden decided that he was okay with not feeling any remorse for them. The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead."

"Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad."

"“Stop,” Holden said. “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear any more of your stories about how being a cop makes you wiser and deeper and able to face the truth about humanity. As far as I can tell, all it did was break you. Okay?” “Yeah, okay.” “Dresden and his Protogen buddies thought they could choose who lives and who dies. That sound familiar? And don’t tell me it’s different this time, because everyone says that, every time. And it’s not.”"

"And now they were making music from the screams of the dying. Of the dead. The were dancing to it in the low-rent clubs. What it must be like, Miller thought, to be young and soulless. But no. That wasn’t fair. Diogo was a good kid. He was just naive. The universe would take care of that, given a little time."

"Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went."

"If Fred couldn’t build himself a peace treaty, the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end. Well, what was history if not that? And how would having the stars change anything?"

"He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared."

"It was as easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult."

"He cut the connection before she could answer. Long goodbyes weren’t anyone’s strong suit."

"That man could take a visitation from God with thirty underdressed angels announcing that sex was okay after all and make it seem vaguely depressing."

"The mirror plummeting toward the surface of Ganymede—toward his greenhouse, his soybeans, his life’s work—hadn’t chosen anything. It was a victim of cause and effect, the same as everything else."

"The rich scent of well-balanced soil was like incense."

"I’ve been through a lot of hearings about one damn thing and another. Most of the time they’re exercises in ass covering. If the unvarnished truth ever came out at one, it would be because someone screwed up."

"Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up."

"The intensity of your feelings isn’t evidence."

"“I’m not a traitor,” Bobbie said to her reflection in the mirror. Mirror Bobbie looked unconvinced."

"Familiarity might breed contempt, but Bobbie hadn’t much liked Soren right from the start."

"When Bobbie tried to imagine being so wealthy you could own a spaceship just to compete in races, she failed. That the same girl had run away to be an OPA rebel probably said a lot about the relationship of wealth and contentment, but Bobbie had a hard time being that philosophical."

"Owning your own racing ship wasn’t even wealth. It was like speciation. It was conspicuous consumption befitting ancient Earth royalty, a pharaoh’s pyramid with a reaction drive."

"“That’s not the game,” Avasarala said. “No one gets shot. They get marginalized. It’s worse.” “No, it’s not. I’ve seen people shot. I’ve seen my friends shot. When you say, ‘That’s not the game,’ you mean for people like you. Not like me.” Avasarala’s expression cooled. “Yes, that’s what I mean,” the old woman said. “The level we’re playing at has different rules. It’s like playing go. It’s all about exerting influence. Controlling the board without occupying it.” “Poker is a game, too,” Bobbie said. “But sometimes the stakes get so high that one player decides it’s easier to kill the other guy and walk away with the money. It happens all the time.”"

"She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle."

"“I’m not asking you to sleep with him.” “Good, because I don’t use sex as a weapon,” Bobbie said. “I use weapons as weapons.”"

"It took his breath away. The elegance and functionality of the structure lay out before him, as beautiful and simple and effective as a leaf or a root cluster. To have something so much like the fruits of evolution, but designed by human minds, was awe-inspiring. It was the pinnacle of what creativity meant, the impossible made real."

"There was justice to be had. He just couldn’t afford it."

"They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression."

"The proportions, the black hair, the dark eyes, everything was the same. Only, giant. It short-circuited his neural wiring. The lizard living at the back of his brain kept jumping back and forth between Mate with it! and Flee from it!"

"“No,” Avasarala said. “Uh, no? You might be forgetting whose ship you’re on.” “I’m sorry, did I seem to give a fuck that this is your ship? If I did, really, I was just being polite.”"

"Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge."

"“Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air."

"“Why aren’t you doing that?” “Do you want the real reason, or my justification?”"

"The holy fool who’d dragged the solar system into war and seemed utterly blind to the damage he caused. An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was."

"If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too."

"That man’s asshole must be tight enough right now to bend space."

"The truth was her version wasn’t any more or less a fantasy than his. No one would know for sure until everyone knew for sure."

"“Space is too fucking big. It’s the same old story.” He’d guessed right. She just wanted to talk, so he let her. “What story?” “Empire. Every empire grows until its reach exceeds its grasp. We started out fighting over who got the best branches in one tree. Then we climb down and fight over a few kilometers’ worth of trees. Then someone starts riding horses, and you get empires of hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Ships open up empire expansion across the oceans. The Epstein drive gave us the outer planets...” She trailed off and tapped out something on the comm panel. She didn’t volunteer who she was sending messages to, and Holden didn’t ask. When she was done, she said, “But the story is always the same. No matter how good your technology is, at some point you’ll conquer territory that you can’t hold on to.” “You’re talking about the outer planets?” “Not specifically,” she said, her voice growing soft and thoughtful. “I’m talking about the entire fucking concept of empire. The Brits couldn’t hold on to India or North America because why should people listen to a king who’s six thousand kilometers away?”"

"I hope we don’t start shooting, but what I hope will happen and what actually happens are almost never the same."

"There was a time, Prax knew, that the violence would have bothered him. Not the blood or bodies. He’d spent more than enough time doing dissections and even autonomous-limb vivisection to be able to wall off what he was seeing from any particular sense of visceral horror. But that it was something done in anger, that the men and women he’d just seen blown apart hadn’t donated their bodies or tissues, would have affected him once. The universe had taken that from him, and he couldn’t say now exactly when it had happened. Part of him was numb, and maybe it always would be. There was a feeling of loss in that, but it was intellectual."

"That night’s selection was called Windblown Grass. It didn’t exactly smell like grass to Holden, but it was nice. Just a hint of earthiness to it. Holden had a suspicion that all perfumes were named randomly, anyway."

"That’s not a government, it’s a rugby scrum with a currency."

"Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same little corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across what was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were trivial. There was a lot more nothing than something."

"Ashford has only ever done a right thing because he’s afraid of being embarrassed. He’s a pretty uniform surrounding vacuum. And you can’t rely on that."

"“We came out here with an operational plan,” she said. “If we start rewriting it every time we find an adjustment we’d like to make, we might as well not have bothered.” Privately, Bull thought the same thing, but with a different inflection. If he’d been XO, the operational plan would have been called a suggested guideline and only opened when he wanted a good laugh."

"“Annie,” Tilly said. “If I wanted to suck vile fluids out of a flaccid and indifferent tube, I’d have stayed on Earth with my husband.”"

"What had been logical became dumb, and all it took was changing the context."

"“Same here, Cap’n,” Amos said. “I got a lot of past in my past.”"

"There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name."

"That kind of attention changes people, and it don’t make them better."

"No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician."

"Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls."