Abaddon’s Gate Quotes

“Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It's attractive because it's simple, it's direct, it's almost always available as an option. When you can't think of a good rebuttal for your opponent's argument, you can always punch them in the face.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“I keep warning you. Doors and corners, kid. That's where they get you. Humans are too fucking stupid to listen.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“No rest for the wicked, no peace for the good.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'll still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She'd look up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She'd tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity that had put her there.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she'll be haunted by what might be behind it.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster,”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“His words were full of hope and threat.

Like the stars.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“You're the predator right up until you're prey.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Same here, Cap'n," Amos said. "I got a lot of past in my past.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Optimism expressed as conservation of delta V.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“They’d made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they’d hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“She’d always found a deep comfort in praying. A profound sense of connection to something infinitely larger than herself. Her atheist friends called it awe in the face of an infinite cosmos. She called it God. That they might be talking about the same thing didn’t bother her at all. It was possible she was hurling her prayers at a cold and unfeeling universe that didn’t hear them, but that wasn’t how it felt. Science had given mankind many gifts, and she valued it. But the one important thing it had taken away was the value of subjective, personal experience. That had been replaced with the idea that only measurable and testable concepts had value. But humans didn’t work that way, and Anna suspected the universe didn’t either. In God’s image, after all, being a tenet of her faith. At first,”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“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.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“We’re like children,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet and lecturing down at him. “Who burn their hands on a hot stove and then think the solution is to blow up all the stoves.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“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.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“What have we got?" Ashford said. "Short form."
"It's fucking weird, sir," Chan said.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“God, save me from temperance," Tilly said. "You haven't seen a party till you get a group of Anglicans and Catholics trying to beat each other to the bottom of a bottle."
"Now, that's not nice, Mrs Fagan," Father Michel said. "I've never met an Anglican that could keep up with me.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Through millions of klicks of vacuum to hit a bull's-eye smaller than a mosquito's asshole.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Science had given mankind many gifts, and she valued it. But the one important thing it had taken away was the value of subjective, personal experience. That had been replaced with the idea that only measurable and testable concepts had value. But humans didn't work that way...”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate