Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

68. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

72. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

74. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.”

— R.F. Kuang

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It’s shackling you. You’ve identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you. When are you going to realize you can’t be one of them?”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

90. “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

91. “But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism. It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.”

— R.F. Kuang

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “Restraint. Repression. Had he not practised this his entire life? Let the pain slide off you like raindrops, without acknowledgment, without reaction, because to pretend it is not happening is the only way to survive.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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