539 Quotes by James S.A. Corey

It was strange how a person could be so vitally important in your life, and yet you had nothing to say to them when they weren’t sharing the same air.

It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdalae, and sometimes they touched.

You’ve got a pit bull on one side of you and a rottweiler on the other, first thing you do is drop your steak.

Hey,” she said. “Hey.” “So I have a thing.” “Is it a thing I can fix?” Holden asked. “Point me at the thing.

Jim, they make these things not to be fiddled with. The civilian version of this device fuses itself into a solid lump of silicon if it thinks it’s being tampered with. Who knows what the military version of the fail-safe is? Drop the magnetic bottle in the reactor? Turn us into a supernova?

I wouldn’t want people to judge me by what I did in my twenties.

The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it.

It was strange how nothing could change while everything did.

Human violence as a kind of fractal – self-similar on all scales from bar fight to system-wide war. The buildup of insults and lost face that swelled over the course of an evening or a century. The shoving and shoving back, neither side sure they wanted to escalate and uncertain how to back down.