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Quotes from Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection — James S. A. Corey

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← All quotes by James S. A. Corey

20 quotes

All the ways they wanted to help her, but never asked how she wanted to be helped.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

A liberal arts background was a hard thing to overcome, but she was doing great.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

The several unexamined assumptions in the argument remained unexamined.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

Two points defined a line, but three defined the playing field.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

I would rather be damned as naïve than willfully ignorant.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

The most effective lies, after all, convince the liar.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

For this to work, a million things have to go right. For it to fall apart, just one of them has to go wrong.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

It’s the basic problem with religion, be it Jesus or Vishnu or God Emperors. Ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

I was looking at the oak and recognizing the acorn.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

He had been desperate for a narrative, and now that I’d given him one, it seemed unlikely that he would see anything else.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

It seemed like the kind of asserted reality—the willful decision to believe that people would act the way you preferred that they would—that posed a constant threat to those of us in research.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

She wanted to believe. But she also knew better.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

He remembered his mother saying The only right you have with anyone in this life is the right to walk away. He thought about his father’s need to frame everything as an epic struggle between himself and the universe.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

You’re young yet. I’m not. There’s this thing when you get older where you have to make a choice. Everyone does. You have to decide whether you care more about being your best self or your real one. If you’re more loyal to who you ought to be or who you really are.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

He found himself crafting the role of Governor Rittenaur as if he were acting a part in a play. He had come to notice when his own impulses were different from what Governor Rittenaur’s would be, and then bury his own judgment to give space to the requirement of his office. He was a professional impersonator of himself.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

And because it was the most habitable of the new planets by orders of magnitude, it was developed. Because it was developed, it was influential. Because it was influential, it was wealthy. And because it was wealthy, it was corrupt.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

She understood on a deep, animal level that sex was like music or language. It could express anything. Love, yes. Or anger, or bitterness, or despair. It could be a way to grieve or a way to take revenge. It could be a weapon or a nightmare or a solace. Sex was meaningless, and so it could mean anything.

Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: James S. A. Corey (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.