Best Babylon's Ashes Quotes by James S.A. Corey

"Your relief effort bullshit? Belters need supplies, let them buy some. Mine is mine."

"Free Navy, my fucking ass! You’re thieves. You’re pirates."

"I’m just a complex tissue of affectation and vice."

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

"If she’d loved mathematics more than she did, it might have happened."

"The universe needs a knife, then it makes a knife. And no one sharper, you."

"Everything we set out to do, we’ve done. It’s time to begin the third phase."

"Please respond, Azure Dragon, or we’ll shoot you some more."

"It’s just strange being out here again. And I can’t help wondering whether I know anyone on that ship."

"I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid."

"It’s all right," Holden said. "I’ve got you."

"I’m fine," she said. "I mean all shot up, but I’m fine."

"You aren’t trained for this kind of action. Going out on the float with a gun in your hand is different from being on the ground. Or being a technician inside a ship."

"I would put everyone else that exists headfirst out an airlock just to keep you around."

"It’s an explanation. It’s why you need to take your boy off my station, and never bring him back to it."

"We can’t keep working with the bastard," Michio said.

"If the universe needs a knife, it makes a knife," Josep said. "If it needs a pirate queen, it makes Michio Pa."

"We don't run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people."

"I thought if you told people facts, they'd draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too."

"You gave people all the information, they'd do the right thing, you know? Not always, maybe, but usually."

"The culture in the outer planets has always been one of mutual support."

"We may not be in a position to wait for them to get their ducks in a row."

"You’re reaching for more unapproved press releases? You remember starting a war that way once?"

"What happens when you stand up? You’re cut down."

"It’s the future. We might as well get some practice with it."

"The universe was billions of points of unwavering light—stars and galaxies stretching out through time and space."

"The days were long and empty, wound tightly around a single, overwhelming question."

"Whether she’s right or wrong is beside the point. She broke with your authority."

"Technically, this is disobeying an order, but I have great faith in our cause."

"We pause when it's time to pause, and we strike when it's time to strike."

"Sex, in Michio’s experience, was like music. Or language. It could express anything. Now it was rage and sorrow and need."

"Good thing she wasn’t doing it for the popularity."

"Everyone hates us, but no one’s shooting yet."

"It’s not good and it’s not bad. It’s just part of how the universe is."

"I don’t know. I know what my project is. Get the things the Belt needs and give them to the people that need them the most. But… no one’s going to thank us for it."

"My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough."

"We’re going to have to tell them we were ambushed and Fred died, but Marco totally didn’t win."

"Stay in motion, because once she rested, she didn’t know how she would bring herself to ever start again."

"Meditation was there so that she could be with herself, experience what it meant to be Chrisjen Avasarala more deeply."

"Fred Johnson. Butcher of Anderson Station. Hero of the UN Navy and traitorous voice of the OPA."

"Only saying, a man who’s feeling like he lost face, yeah? He’ll say things he doesn’t mean because of it."

"You put the ship at risk, that’s what happens. Those colony bastards weren’t coming to play dice and make happy."

"After the abandonment of Ceres, I went on playing the role of elder statesman for a while."

"Everything about her statement had been negotiated."

"Nothing to be sad about in that. Except that I am sad."

"Perspective, he figured. Shittiest ship there was still had to be better than the best cell in the pit, if only because you got to pick that you were in it."

"Anyone who can shut the cap’n up like that wins the ass-kicking contest every time."

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

"He cracked my ass the other way for that one."

"If one native impulse is overcome, there will be another."

"Even when you wipe out or co-opt the local environment completely, you’re changed by the pushback."

"We’re not putting people on all of them, even the OPA’s not that suicidal."

"Saving humanity doesn’t prevent bone-density loss or muscular atrophy."

"We’re here to remove the false governance of the Free Navy and return control of the station to its citizens."

"The situation changes; that doesn’t mean you do."

"The Belt didn’t get screwed because of you or me."

"As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way."

"If you act like a child, you will be treated like a child."

"We’re still doing all the same things we did before."

"I’m giving you an excuse to drop out of the fighting."

"Let them come. Let them win their little victories."
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"The liberation of Medina means more than freeing one station from violent tyranny. It means the reopening of the path to all the colonies and all the worlds that the Free Navy tried to lock away."

"The conspirators will be brought to Luna and introduced to their lawyers."

"We’ve been screwed since the minute I blew up that reactor. Doesn’t take away from the essential dignity of the situation. And this is a fine hill."

"The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away."

"I may have been spending too much time with you. I’m starting to think like you."

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

"There’s a significant population of the Belt that’s not going to be able to move down a gravity well. They’re just going to be forgotten. Left to die off."

"Under the wrong conditions, it’s not safe to go through the gates."

"We need a fast, efficient way to trade with the colony worlds for raw materials."

"Limited sovereignty in exchange for regulatory input from the major governing bodies."

"Don’t ask me to put out on the first date, Walker. I’m not that kind of girl."