Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Maybe it was Highlander Syndrome – I’ve read about that before, the way members of marginalized groups feel threatened if someone else like them starts finding success.”

— R.F. Kuang

52. “Fear was impossible to eradicate. But so was the will to survive.”

— R.F. Kuang

53. “From ash we come, and to ash we return.”

— R.F. Kuang

54. “Here at Babel, we take inspiration from Psammetichus.’ He peered around, and his sparkling gaze landed on each of them in turn as he spoke. ‘Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign peoples that brings wealth and prosperity to all.”

— R.F. Kuang

55. “I don’t need your pity. I need you to kill them for me. You have to kill them for me,” Venka hissed. “Swear it. Swear on your blood that you will burn them.”

— R.F. Kuang

56. “Born in Hong Kong, raised between Sydney and New York, educated in British boarding schools that gave her a posh, unplaceable foreign accent; tall and razor-thin, graceful in the way all former ballet dancers are, porcelain pale and possessed of these massive, long-lashed brown eyes that make her look like a Chinese Anne Hathaway.”

— R.F. Kuang

57. “How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism.”

— R.F. Kuang

58. “Then I will die on my feet,” she said. “I will die with flames in my hand and fury in my heart. I will die fighting for the legacy of my people, rather than on Shiro’s operating table, drugged and wasted. I will not die a coward.”

— R.F. Kuang

59. “As for my approach to historical fiction, I think what I’m drawing from is Saidiya Hartman’s technique of critical fabulation, which is a way of writing against the grain, of injecting empathy and realism to the archival record of a history that feels abstract to us.”

— R.F. Kuang

60. “It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?”

— R.F. Kuang

61. “Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant. 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?”

— R.F. Kuang

62. “Small wonder Griffin was furious. Small wonder he hated Babel with such vehemence. Griffin had been robbed of everything – a mother tongue, a motherland, a family.”

— R.F. Kuang

63. “I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.”

— R.F. Kuang

64. “English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”

— R.F. Kuang

65. “But the boy already had a god of his own. And the gods were selfish.”

— R.F. Kuang

66. “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

67. “He knew exactly what choice she’d made and what she intended. And that made everything- hating her, loving her, surviving her, so much harder.”

— R.F. Kuang

68. “Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”

— R.F. Kuang

69. “Rin could not understand how the Federation had found so many different ways to inflict suffering. But each corner they turned revealed another instance in the string of horrors, barbarian savagery matched only by inventiveness.”

— R.F. Kuang

70. “Elites with entrenched interests will always hate you,” Daji said. “That’s inevitable. But the elites don’t matter, the masses do. What you have to do is shroud yourself in myth. Your enemies’ deaths become part of your legend. Eventually you will become so far removed from reality that right and wrong don’t apply to you. Your identity becomes part and parcel of the idea of the nation itself. They’ll love you no matter what you do.”

— R.F. Kuang

71. “Great danger is always associated with great power. The difference between the great and the mediocre is that the great are willing to take the risk.”

— R.F. Kuang

72. “Rin wasn’t surprised that Nezha had cut Kitay out of his social circle. There was no way Nezha would have stuck around anyone half as witty as Kitay – there were too many opportunities for Kitay to upstage him. “What’d you do to offend him?” Kitay pulled a face. “Nothing, except beat him on the exam. Nezha’s prickly about his ego. Why, what did you do?” “I gave him that black eye,” she admitted. Kitay raised an eyebrow. “Nice.”

— R.F. Kuang

73. “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”

— R.F. Kuang

74. “Build on your anger. don’t ever let go of that anger. Rage gives you power. Caution does not.”

— R.F. Kuang

75. “My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.”

— R.F. Kuang

76. “They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud.”

— R.F. Kuang

77. “I have seen the end of things,” he said. “The shape of the world has changed. The gods now walk in men as they have not for a long, long time. Tyr will not return. The Bizarre Children answer to you now, and you alone.”

— R.F. Kuang

78. “If we push in the right spots – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. The the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premed tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.”

— R.F. Kuang

79. “Who has the right to write about suffering?”

— R.F. Kuang

80. “People will seek to use you or destroy you. If you want to live, you must pick a side. So do not shirk from war, child. Do not flinch from suffering. When you hear screaming, run toward it.”

— R.F. Kuang

81. “Life and death, they’re equal to this cosmos. We enter the material world and we go away again, reincarnated into something better.”

— R.F. Kuang

82. “She had not just altered the fabric of the universe, had not simply rewritten the script. She had torn it, ripped a great gaping hole in the cloth of reality, and set fire to it with the ravenous rage of an uncontrollable god.”

— R.F. Kuang

83. “It seemed so unfair. No, it seemed impossible that Ramy could just leave this world so abruptly, that he could be so alive one moment and so still the next. It seemed to defy the laws of physics that Ramiz Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet.”

— R.F. Kuang

84. “Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.”

— R.F. Kuang

85. “No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.”

— R.F. Kuang

86. “Yin?” The apprentice let him go. “And what is the well-bred heir to the House of Yin doing brawling in a hallway?” “She punched me in the face!” Nezha screeched. A nasty bruise was already blossoming around his left eye, a bright splotch of purple against porcelain skin. The apprentice raised an eyebrow at Rin. “And why would you do that?” “He insulted my teacher,” she said. “Oh? Well, that’s different.” The apprentice looked amused. “Weren’t you taught not to insult teachers? That’s taboo.”

— R.F. Kuang

87. “This was a failure of nerve. A refusal to push things to the limit. Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option. The gun was right there, lying on the table, waiting for them to pick it up. Why were they so afraid to even look at it?”

— R.F. Kuang

88. “He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive.”

— R.F. Kuang

89. “For the first time since I submitted the manuscript, I feel a deep wash of shame. This isn’t my history, my heritage. This isn’t my community. I am an outsider, basking in their love under false pretenses. It should be Athena sitting here, smiling with these people, signing books and listening to the stories of her elders.”

— R.F. Kuang

90. “The poet runs untrammeled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.”

— R.F. Kuang

91. “You humans always think you’re destined for things, for tragedy or for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose.”

— R.F. Kuang

92. “It must be nice, possessing all the power, so that you could approach geopolitics like a chess game, popping in curiously to observe which countries deserved your aid and which didn’t.”

— R.F. Kuang

93. “London had accumulated the lion’s share of both the world’s silver ore and the world’s languages, and the result was a city that was bigger, heavier, faster, and brighter than nature.”

— R.F. Kuang

94. “She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in. The only creature in this vast, cruel land who could kill him. And sometimes, in his loveliest dreams, he imagines she does.”

— R.F. Kuang

95. “He brushed his lips against her forehead as he drove the knife deeper into her back.”

— R.F. Kuang

96. “I command the Cike.” Chaghan looked sideways at her. His expression was grim. “You are going to paint the world in Altan’s blood, aren’t you?” “I’m going to find and kill everyone responsible,” said Rin. “You cannot stop me.” Chaghan laughed a dry, cutting laugh. “Oh, I’m not going to stop you.” He held out his hand. She grasped it, and the drowned land and the ash-choked sky bore witness to the pact between Seer and Speerly.”

— R.F. Kuang

97. “He can’t be real, she thought. A boy made of flesh and bone could not be so painfully lovely, so free of any blemish or flaw.”

— R.F. Kuang

98. “They were all suffering the same unspoken, private fear, a creeping dread that this strike might do nothing but damn themselves, and that their cries would go unheard into the unforgiving dark.”

— R.F. Kuang

99. “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows. PLATO, Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett.”

— R.F. Kuang

100. “You’re lost, brother. You’re a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It’s gone.” He paused beside Robin on his way to the door. His fingers landed on Robin’s shoulder, squeezed so hard they hurt. “But realize this, brother. You fly no one’s flag. You’re free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.”

— R.F. Kuang