Top 35 Lydia Kang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you’re going to cry, go to church and pray for the living. The dead don’t need your tears.”

— Lydia Kang

2. “All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dosage makes a thing not poison.”

— Lydia Kang

3. “Today, we now know that overconsumption of gin – or really any alcohol – can also lead to “gin blossoms.” Yes, sometimes that means a late-night dose of sentimentality and “Hey Jealousy” on repeat as you wax nostalgic about the Clinton years, but also, more harmfully, gin blossoms on your face. These gin blossoms are the red lines and dots on the faces of heavy drinkers, which are dilated capillaries caused by drinking too much alcohol.”

— Lydia Kang

4. “Allene never knew that murder could make Monday mornings so wonderful. It.”

— Lydia Kang

5. “She was astonished at how lies had entirely filtered her vision for the last several weeks. Years, even.”

— Lydia Kang

6. “Trust no one, I scold myself. Even if they smell good.”

— Lydia Kang

7. “Unfortunately, the theory that ‘more is better’ is a really, really crappy theory when it comes to arsenic.”

— Lydia Kang

8. “Then there were antimony pills. Unlike our one-use pharmaceuticals today, these metal pills were heavy, and after passing through the bowels they were often relatively unchanged. They were dutifully retrieved from latrines, washed, and reused over and over again. Talk about recycling. The “everlasting pills” or “perpetual pills” were often lovingly handed down from generation to generation as an heirloom.”

— Lydia Kang

9. “Trust is essential when you’re planning to lie to everyone you know.”

— Lydia Kang

10. “But behind every misguided treatment – from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome – is the incredible power of the human desire to live.”

— Lydia Kang

11. “Welcome to Aureus, land of illegal freaks. Have some torture and tea while you’re here.”

— Lydia Kang

12. “For once, I’ll be proud to be in the shadows.”

— Lydia Kang

13. “She had the sort of beauty that left you bleeding internally after gazing for too long.”

— Lydia Kang

14. “It’s a dreadful vexation to be a shadow when you’re supposed to be the sun.”

— Lydia Kang

15. “A young man propped up a ladder to capture photographs of the scene, yawning afterward. Death in Manhattan must be a rather boring affair, even when it happened to the rich and beautiful.”

— Lydia Kang

16. “A woman’s mind is ever in need of being uncaged.”

— Lydia Kang

17. “The clouds were a perfect white on turquoise. How rude of the sky to be so blue and pretty when Lucy couldn’t admire it. Such a thoughtless sky.”

— Lydia Kang

18. “How rude of the sky to be so blue and pretty when Lucy couldn’t admire it.”

— Lydia Kang

19. “It’s always best to be ready for a medical emergency and nothing says “prepared” like having a tobacco smoke enema kit next to your first aid supplies.”

— Lydia Kang

20. “Personally, she didn’t believe in heaven or hell. An earthly life was hell enough, and heaven appeared in the ephemera of every day, like dust motes sparkling in a quiet sunrise, or a warm handshake on a frigid day. Stolen gifts.”

— Lydia Kang

21. “There is something more powerful in this galaxy than money. More powerful than weapons, or cunning. It’s love. You know what the most dangerous thing in the world is? To love someone. Because you hand the most breakable, precious thing over to this person. You willingly give them your living, beating heart, and it’s theirs to crush ar their will.”

— Lydia Kang

22. “Humans needed meat and vegetables and desserts.”

— Lydia Kang

23. “But it was tiring, so tiring to never be in full possession of yourself. She was a woman, after all. It was their lot in life, wasn’t it? Never to own yourself completely.”

— Lydia Kang

24. “To be surrounded by books, by thoughts, by places and people and things that she had not yet met – it was a haven unlike any other.”

— Lydia Kang

25. “Cosmetics had been used to make her skin porcelain white. A blush of pink had been dusted onto her cheeks, and her lips were reddened with salve.”

— Lydia Kang

26. “There were only so many pieces of your heart that could be damaged before it irrevocably changed you.”

— Lydia Kang

27. “So long as I can learn about this precious, extraordinary, and occasionally heartless world, I can be content.”

— Lydia Kang

28. “Opiates are for broken bones, not broken hearts.”

— Lydia Kang

29. “If there was one thing that made humans uncomfortable, it was silence. They didn’t know what to do with it, except to fill it with words that gave away their inner thoughts – an arsenal of useful information.”

— Lydia Kang

30. “Today, Coca-Cola still actually contains coca extract, just without the fun part. Although the exact recipe is a closely guarded trade secret, the company does import coca leaves legally from Peru’s National Coca Company. After the cocaine is extracted and sold for pharmaceutical use by eye, ear, nose, and throat specialists as a topical anesthesia, the remaining flavor of the coca leaves is enveloped into the secret recipe.”

— Lydia Kang

31. “Defeat is particularly lethal early on in any journey; don’t let it be your compass.”

— Lydia Kang

32. “As stars are born and die,′ Creighton said, ’so does times move forward. Relentlessly so. And yet we fight. We will never stop fighting for light and life in this galaxy.”

— Lydia Kang

33. “I love my little oubliette.”

— Lydia Kang

34. “Everyone was always smoothing away the ripples that Tillie created.”

— Lydia Kang

35. “Forgetting is an act of survival. We are women, Mathilda. We endure to survive.”

— Lydia Kang

36. “Stories are how the world evolves.”

— Lydia Kang

37. “Exceptionally scandalous. Tillie would like to embroider that on her lapel.”

— Lydia Kang

38. “No woman lives a life unscathed. It’s what makes us strong. We are broken and mended, remade every time. We must, or it destroys us.”

— Lydia Kang