Top 140 Ken Liu Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A lord who knows how to wield men is ten times more fearsome than one who knows only how to wield a sword.”

— Ken Liu

52. “What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?”

— Ken Liu

53. “As the moon rose, I saw the light illuminate an ancient quote from the Ano Classics, carved into one of the broken lintels: ‘All life is an experiment.”

— Ken Liu

54. “A great warrior trusts not his weapons, but himself. When you possess true strength, you can deal a killing blow even if all you have is a blade of grass. “Now.”

— Ken Liu

55. “At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure. Ruth.”

— Ken Liu

56. “A man who can kill several people with a sword is merely a living weapon. A great warrior can kill thousands of men with just his mind.”

— Ken Liu

57. “Each beautiful story is thus also a monument to its own imperfection, and to dare to fall from the false promise of all-appealing grace is the most crucial act of every writer.”

— Ken Liu

58. “The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.”

— Ken Liu

59. “Politics were for those who had too much to eat.”

— Ken Liu

60. “Time devours all.”

— Ken Liu

61. “What is so bad about being compared to women?” Kuni said. “Half the world is made of women.”

— Ken Liu

62. “The universe is full of echoes and shadows, the afterimages and last words of dead civilizations that have lost the struggle against entropy. Fading ripples in the cosmic background radiation, it is doubtful if most, or any, of these messages will ever be deciphered.”

— Ken Liu

63. “Judging was the luxury of those who did not need to survive.”

— Ken Liu

64. “Emperor, king, general, duke,” he whispered to himself. “These are just labels. Climb up the family tree of any of them high enough and you’ll find a commoner who dared to take a chance.”

— Ken Liu

65. “Pictures are important,” I’d tell them. “Our brains are so flawed, leaky sieves of time. Without pictures, so many things we want to remember would be forgotten.”

— Ken Liu

66. “We are old friends,” Cogo said. “But men have roles and masks that they wear, and these have a reality of their own. Authority is a delicate thing, and it must be carefully cultivated by proper ritual and action from the governing and the governed alike.”

— Ken Liu

67. “Yes, what you say sounds like Truth. But the world is full of Truths. So what if you have a Truth?”

— Ken Liu

68. “Now that’s the sort of thing I wish the nobles said more often,” Dafiro whispered to Ratho. “While they resolve all their disputes this way, the rest of us can go back to planting our harvests and enjoying our lives. Let the kings and dukes get in an arena and fight all their wars with their own two hands. We’ll watch and cheer them on.”

— Ken Liu

69. “There is often no line between perfection and evil.”

— Ken Liu

70. “I’m not my father,” she said. “And you’re not your parents. Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.”

— Ken Liu

71. “I want to pick a boy to marry – I’m thinking someone who is kind and has soft hands, maybe someone who grinds mirrors for a living so that he will know that there is another dimension beyond the smooth surface.”

— Ken Liu

72. “The more perfect the ideals, the less ideal the methods.”

— Ken Liu

73. “It’s easy for men to be friends as close as brothers when they’re poor and struggling, but much harder when things are going well. Friends are never as close as blood. Remember that, Rat.”

— Ken Liu

74. “Experience humbles.”

— Ken Liu

75. “Each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die.”

— Ken Liu

76. “The heart is a complicated thing, and we’re capable of many loves, though we’re told that we must value one to the exclusion of others... You can be loyal to your husband at the same time that you take a lover for your own sake, though the poets tell us this is wrong. But why should we believe that the poets understand us better than we do ourselves?”

— Ken Liu

77. “Sin is like wine. The more it is hidden from sunlight, the more it ferments, growing more potent.”

— Ken Liu

78. “Different times require different wisdom.”

— Ken Liu

79. “I’ve always thought it nonsense to believe something true simply because it was written in a book long ago.”

— Ken Liu

80. “Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.”

— Ken Liu

81. “Sometimes it was hard to tell where the performance ended and the real self began – but what was this “real” self other than a set of performances?”

— Ken Liu

82. “The most useful advice I ever got was to keep in mind that every writer’s journey is different, and what worked for someone else wouldn’t necessarily work for you. That adage has been vastly freeing for me in my own journey.”

— Ken Liu

83. “Sometimes, the anger built up so much that people had to scream out their treasonous thoughts just to keep on breathing. Maybe not all of the were really crazy, but it was best for everyone involved to pretend that they were.”

— Ken Liu

84. “The way my father saw it, whether the Manchus on the mainland or the Japanese were in charge didn’t much matter, since they all left us alone except when it came time for taxes.”

— Ken Liu

85. “Your Highness, do not use the word ‘envy’ so casually when you do not know the paths others have trod on. Few women – no, few people – have the advantages you possess. If you lament that you cannot live as you like, perhaps it is because you have not tried to live as yourself at all.”

— Ken Liu

86. “Maybe Soto was right. It was silly to make a fetish out of love, and not to accept that love was like food, and each dish had its own flavor. The heart surely had room for more than one.”

— Ken Liu

87. “If happiness and time are the two axes of a graph, then I’m afraid the curve of my life has already passed the apex and is on its inexorable way down to the bottom.”

— Ken Liu

88. “No single factor means anything. Everything has to be contextualized. There are too many hidden relationships, too many disguised opportunities for profit, too many competing concerns.”

— Ken Liu

89. “In my view, “what if” is at the heart of science fiction. Starting with reality itself, the writer applies plausible and logically consistent conditions to play out a thought experiment, pushing the characters and plot toward an imagined hyperreality that evokes a sense of wonder and estrangement. Faced with the absurd reality of contemporary China, the writer cannot fully explore or express the possibilities of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness without resorting to science fiction.”

— Ken Liu

90. “Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.”

— Ken Liu

91. “It’s one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in that process.”

— Ken Liu

92. “Kuni was the sort of man, Risana realized, who, rather than deceive himself, was so full of self-doubt that he could no longer see himself.”

— Ken Liu

93. “Salt made the blandest food palatable. Salt was like wit and laughter in conversation. Salt made the plain extraordinary. Salt made the simple beautiful.”

— Ken Liu

94. “But they remain opaque to each other, unaware that when it comes to time, everyone is only measuring the universe using the ruler of their own lifespan.”

— Ken Liu

95. “Do you see how much power you have when you act without fear?”

— Ken Liu

96. “I can only wish that someday you’ll also be pestered by a student as persistent to learn what you do not wish to teach.”

— Ken Liu

97. “I want to hone my talent so that it shines brightly, terrorizing the unjust and lighting the way for those who would make the world better. I will protect the innocent and guard the timid. I do not know if I will always do what is right, but I am the Hidden Girl, and my loyalty is to the tranquillity yearned by all.”

— Ken Liu

98. “The character for ‘mob’ is formed from the character for ‘nobility’ on one side and the character for ‘sheep’ on the other. So that’s what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause.”

— Ken Liu

99. “In vengeance, even a rabbit can learn to become a wolf.”

— Ken Liu

100. “The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.”

— Ken Liu