James S. A. Corey

"Jessyn knew the medicine was starting to work when her fantasies changed from suicide to murder."

"“I’m glad you’re feeling better.” I’m not, though, Jessyn thought. I’m just feeling a different kind of bad."

"She remembered one of her therapists saying Anger is pain in a party mask. It had seemed wise at the time. She wasn’t sure if she agreed with it anymore. Maybe anger was a scab over a wound, or maybe it was what happened when the universe spun you so hard that you lost everything. Or maybe it was just a thing that welled up in you when you found yourself lying sleepless in the dark of a prison work camp with no idea what your future might be or if your past mattered."

"What is lost is lost, and why regret a dream I had when I was young just because the universe woke me from it?"

"Stress, power, love. They didn’t change people, but they revealed people as who they were."

"“You know what this is. This is a sign.” “A sign,” he said. “The tools we needed to take on our new project, given to us exactly when we needed them. It’s the universe telling us that Ostencour’s plan is the right thing to do.” “Or the natural playing out of consequences,” Campar said, trying for lightness. “Hard to tell those apart sometimes.”"

"In a world without privacy, etiquette had to suffice."

"Most people were cowards. Being angry about that was like being angry at time for passing."

"Humans are structureless. They live in conflict with themselves and each other. Their great genius is rationalization: lying into mirrors until they bully and seduce themselves into things they would never otherwise do. They are creatures of self-delusion, regret, and desire."

"If you are strong, you will serve in your life. If not, you will serve in your death. All serve."

"But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them. So, Bridge. Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant."

"“The central government—” he began, and Piotr shook his head.” “The government’s just people. A bunch of clueless assholes just like us who get paid to take the fact that there’s a bunch of monsters out there looking to kill us and put a brave face on it. They just want to make sure we don’t panic.”"

"I don’t know much about biotech stuff, and I don’t care. What I care is that each of you have a lump of electrified fat in your skull that can act like a general-purpose problem-solving engine with a response time we can’t build elsewhere without making the problems real easy. Real easy problems are for drones and automated systems. Tricky problems are for you."

"My dad used to say that anyone who believes in a fair fight has never been in a fight."

"“We’re freeing the prisoners,” Simeon said. “If we fail, they die. If we procrastinate, they die.” “If we go, we die, Gleaner said, but with a grin in his voice. “Control hasn’t given us authorization to die,” Simeon replied. “It’s not in the budget.”"

"Karen tried to divine from the news whether they were winning the war or losing it. He might just as well have swirled tea leaves and looked for patterns there."

"Book/Play1 (Book/Play1)"

"Book/Play2 (Book/Play2)"

"He wasn’t a man who reined in his curiosity well."

"Sometimes when we make these distinctions, we’re really creating them more than describing anything that’s already there."

"“Hell no,” Jim said when they were alone in the suite. “Absolutely no. No fucking way, no. There have got to be a billion different ways to say no, and I’d still have to cycle through them a couple times to really express the depth of no on this one. Clarissa Mao? On the Roci? How is that anything but a massive load of let’s-not-do-that?”"

"She felt like her soul was a handful of dice that were still rolling, and what came up would decide the shape that the rest of her life took."

"Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better."

"Humanity was so flawed. Not just her, but everyone. Half the population was below average intelligence. Half below average dedication. Average adherence to duty. The cruel law of statistics. It was astounding that as a race they’d managed as much as they had."

"History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect."

"“Me? You don’t want to judge anything by me. I don’t even trust God.” “You are absolutely the worst mystic ever,” Pa said, but she said it laughing."

"All of them do what they think is right, and tell themselves that they’re moral people with the strength to do the necessary things, however terrible they seem at the time. Every atrocity that has been done to us had someone behind it who thought what they did was justified. And here I am. A moral person with the strength to do this. Because it’s justified."

"Sex was one of those things where the way it was supposed to work and the way it worked for him didn’t always match up real well. He knew all the stuff about love and affection, and that just seemed like making shit up. He understood making shit up. He also understood how people talked about it, and he could talk about it that way just to fit in."

"A decent idea now is way better than a brilliant plan when it’s too late."

"If we’re not willing to win the fight, I’m not sure what we’re doing in the cage."

"How many millions of times had people had this exact conversation before? How many wars had put two people together for a moment and then washed them apart? There had to be a tradition of it. A secret history of vulnerability and want and all the things that sex promised and only occasionally delivered. They were just one more couple among all the countless others. It only hurt this time because it was them."

"History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from."

"Avasarala stretched her right leg, feeling the ache in it. It would be worse in the morning. Lifting weights was an argument against a benign God. As if that needed more evidence."

"It was the widest concerted attack ever. Hundreds of ships on at least four sides. Dozens of stations, millions of lives. Among the stars, it didn’t stand out."

"Djuna had stopped letting him watch the local newsfeeds at breakfast on the weekends. Too many stories about bodies being found in unfortunate conditions. Too many missing people, too many espionage claims, too many reminders from the still-official security apparatus that Pinkwater was an unaffiliated corporate entity with no political litmus tests and only the safety and well-being of the citizens of Ganymede at heart. The sorts of things people said because they weren’t true."

"“That’s the problem with things you can’t do twice,” Naomi said. “You can’t ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.” “No. But you can say that if we don’t do something different, it’ll happen again. And again. And again, over and over until something changes the game.”"

"The universe was filled with mysteries and beauty and awe, and all that they could manage to do with it was this. Chase each other down and see who was the faster draw."

"Josep grunted. “Could be prophecy.” “Could be that the universe doesn’t give a shit about us or anything we do and your mystic bullshit’s just a way we try to pretend otherwise.”"

"“An unshakable faith in humanity.” “It’s true,” he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. “Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”"

"“Dying’s not an art project.” “Maybe it should be.”"

"“Hey,” Holden said. “Do you know what Planck’s constant is?” “Six point six two six plus change times ten to the negative thirty-fourth meters squared kilos per second?” “Sure, why not,” Holden said, raising one finger. “But do you know why it’s that and not six point seven whatever the rest of it was?” Naomi shook her head. “Neither does anyone else. They still call it science. Most of what we know isn’t why things are what they are. We just figure out enough about how they work that we can predict the next thing that’s going to happen. That’s what you’ve got. Enough to predict. And if you think you’re right, then I do too. So let’s do this.”"

"She’d ended with I’ll do whatever I can, but you might have to make do with being avenged."

"If wars began with rage, they ended with exhaustion."

"Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives."

"Some things were secret even after you told them."

"Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter. Or at least not the way she’d thought they did."

"Time healed all wounds, but it didn’t erase the scars so much as decorate them."

"English quotation."

"The imperial view, a history professor at the Naval Academy once said, is the long view. Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that’s left is the building."

"Collaboration with the dead left questions that could never be answered."