Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic.”

— R.F. Kuang

2. “Travel sounds fun until you realize what you really want is to stay at home with a cup of tea and a stack of books by a warm fire.”

— R.F. Kuang

3. “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence. FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox.”

— R.F. Kuang

4. “It’s harder to keep living.”

— R.F. Kuang

5. “The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another. The Swiss philologist Johann Breitinger, who claimed that languages were merely “collections of totally equivalent words and locutions which are interchangeable, and which fully correspond to each other in meaning”, was dreadfully wrong. Language is not like maths.”

— R.F. Kuang

6. “Fire and water looked so lovely together. It was a pity they destroyed each other by nature.”

— R.F. Kuang

7. “Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.”

— R.F. Kuang

8. “Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.”

— R.F. Kuang

9. “I could kill you,” said Altan, muttering the death threat like a love song, and when she-as-Chaghan struggled against him he pressed his body closer.”

— R.F. Kuang

10. “One thing united them all, without Babel they had nowhere in this country to go. They had been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they didn’t understand and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified. They had the keys to the kingdom. They did not want to give them back.”

— R.F. Kuang

11. “Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet. The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth. CHARLES V.”

— R.F. Kuang

12. “Quae caret ora cruore nostro? What coast knows not our blood? HORACE, Odes.”

— R.F. Kuang

13. “War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”

— R.F. Kuang

14. “Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”

— R.F. Kuang

15. “We can, through perfecting the arts of translation, achieve what humanity lost at Babel.”

— R.F. Kuang

16. “Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.”

— R.F. Kuang

17. “Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.”

— R.F. Kuang

18. “You asked how large my sorrow is. And I answered, like a river in spring flowing east.”

— R.F. Kuang

19. “Who is the true god?”... She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in.”

— R.F. Kuang

20. “Robbery, butchery, and theft – they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.”

— R.F. Kuang

21. “The Federation had massacred Golyn Niis for the simple reason that they did not think of the Nikara as human. And if your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed? What was the difference between crushing an ant and setting an anthill on fire? Why shouldn’t you pull wings off insects for your own enjoyment? The bug might feel pain, but what did that matter to you?”

— R.F. Kuang

22. “The act of translation is nothing more than the act of betrayal.”

— R.F. Kuang

23. “Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”

— R.F. Kuang

24. “He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.”

— R.F. Kuang

25. “They can’t say her name in his presence. He’s never made this a rule. But for some reason, none of them dares.”

— R.F. Kuang

26. “I don’t love you. And I can kill anything.”

— R.F. Kuang

27. “He’s got the personality of a wet towel: damp, and he clings.”

— R.F. Kuang

28. “Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.”

— R.F. Kuang

29. “Kay’s flying shuttle, Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s spinning mule, and Cartwright’s loom were all made possible with silver-working. Silver-working has catapulted Britain ahead of every other nation, and put thousands of labourers out of work in the process.”

— R.F. Kuang

30. “Who is imprisoned in the Chuluu Korikh?” he asked.”

— R.F. Kuang

31. “The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them;.”

— R.F. Kuang

32. “Take what you want. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you.”

— R.F. Kuang

33. “But what is the opposite of fidelity?′ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of his dialitic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?”

— R.F. Kuang

34. “He can’t take his eyes off of her. She’s the most magnificent thing he’s ever seen.”

— R.F. Kuang

35. “Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.”

— R.F. Kuang

36. “I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”

— R.F. Kuang

37. “Don’t try to speak,” Nezha murmurs, because it’ll kill him if she does. Because his resolve is only so strong, and if she utters another word then he’ll be lost.”

— R.F. Kuang

38. “This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us.”

— R.F. Kuang

39. “Words tell stories. Specifically, the history of those words – how they came into use, and how their meaning morphed into what they mean today – tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact.”

— R.F. Kuang

40. “Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”

— R.F. Kuang

41. “I received both these scars from men I thought I loved,” Rin said. “One is dead now. One will be.”

— R.F. Kuang

42. “Be selfish,” he whispered. “Be brave.”

— R.F. Kuang

43. “And so religion is merely a social construct in both the east and west,” Rin concluded. “The difference lies in its utility.”

— R.F. Kuang

44. “English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular.”

— R.F. Kuang

45. “It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.”

— R.F. Kuang

46. “It’s easy to be brave. Harder to know when not to fight.”

— R.F. Kuang

47. “Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world.”

— R.F. Kuang

48. “Youth, Rin thought, was an amplification of beauty. It was a filter; it could mask what one was lacking, enhance even the most average features. But beauty without youth was dangerous. The Empress’s beauty did not require the soft fullness of young lips, the rosy red of young cheeks, the tenderness of young skin. This beauty cut deep, like a sharpened crystal. This beauty was immortal.”

— R.F. Kuang

49. “Everything I’ve worked for is this!’ Ramy exclaimed. ‘What, you think I came to Babel because I want to be a translator for the Queen? Birdie, I hate it in this country. I hate the way they look at me, I hate being passed around at their wine parties like an animal on display. I hate knowing that my very presence at Oxford is a betrayal of my race and religion, because I’m becoming just that class of person Macaulay hoped to create.”

— R.F. Kuang

50. “She recognized the way he was looking at her. It was how she’d once looked at Altan. It was the way she’d seen Daji look at Riga – that look of wretched, desperate, and reproachful loyalty. It said, Do it. Take what you want, it said. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you. Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”

— R.F. Kuang