Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I received both these scars from men I thought I loved,” Rin said. “One is dead now. One will be.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

53. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

55. “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

56. “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

57. “By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them.”

— R.F. Kuang

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

63. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

65. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

67. “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

68. “We’re here to make magic with words.”

— R.F. Kuang

69. “Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

72. “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

73. “It’s us. Frozen in time, captured in a moment we’ll never get back as long as we live. It’s wonderful.”

— R.F. Kuang

74. “Sring Venka was a prim, spoiled Sinegardian princess turned lethal soldier turned brittle survivor; of course she’d walk into a war zone with red paint on her lips simply because she felt like it.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

76. “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

77. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

79. “Life is so short. Why do we build up these walls?”

— R.F. Kuang

80. “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

81. “This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.”

— R.F. Kuang

82. “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

83. “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

84. “After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.”

— R.F. Kuang

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “Nothing lasts. The world does not exist.”

— R.F. Kuang

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “He hoped. He hoped until hope became its own form of torture. The original meaning of hope was ‘to desire’, and Robin wanted with every ounce of his being a world that no longer was.”

— R.F. Kuang

93. “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

94. “Nothing lasts,‘” said Nezha, at the same time that Kitay said, “’The world doesn’t exist.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

96. “It were too much to expect that they will not require a further demonstration of force on a larger scale before being brought to their senses.”

— R.F. Kuang

97. “But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.”

— R.F. Kuang

98. “I don’t think you two quite understand how hard it is to be a woman here,’ said Victoire. ‘They’re liberal on paper, certainly. But they think so very little of us. Our landlady roots through our things when we’re out as if she’s searching for evidence that we’ve taken lovers. Every weakness we display is a testament to the worst theories about us, which is that we’re fragile, we’re hysterical, and we’re too naturally weak-minded to handle the kind of work we’re set to do.”

— R.F. Kuang

99. “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

100. “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