Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

106. “They were no longer a cohort. Now they were only a wake.”

— R.F. Kuang

107. “I don’t want peace, I want revenge.”

— R.F. Kuang

108. “Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive.”

— R.F. Kuang

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.”

— R.F. Kuang

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

119. “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

120. “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

121. “Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical. He was bleeding, but he didn’t know where from.”

— R.F. Kuang

122. “The cultural constructions are clear: so many Chinese ghosts are hungry, angry, voiceless women. In taking Athena’s legacy, I’ve added one to their ranks.”

— R.F. Kuang

123. “I’ve labored for years to learn my craft. Perhaps the core idea of this novel wasn’t mine, but I’m the one who rescued it, who freed the diamond from the rough.”

— R.F. Kuang

124. “Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited.”

— R.F. Kuang

125. “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

126. “Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.”

— R.F. Kuang

127. “Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.”

— R.F. Kuang

128. “Our dead don’t leave us. They’ll hunt you as long as you let them.”

— R.F. Kuang

129. “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

130. “People are fragile and desperate fools. They don’t know what’s real and what’s false, so they’ll cling to their little truths, because it’s better than imagining that their world might not matter so much after all.”

— R.F. Kuang

131. “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

132. “It’s hard to accept what you don’t want to see.”

— R.F. Kuang

133. “Men are selfish and petty,” argued Erlang Shen, Grand Marshal of the Heavenly Forces. “Their life spans are so short that they give no thought to the future of the land. If we lend them aid, they will drain this earth and squabble among themselves. There will be no peace.”

— R.F. Kuang

134. “He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love.”

— R.F. Kuang

135. “I‘m exactly what they deserve,” she said. “They don‘t want peace, they want revenge. I‘m it.”

— R.F. Kuang

136. “Ugh, so June Song came out with her non-apology, and I bet white people will be jumping over themselves to defend her. I hate this industry.”

— R.F. Kuang

137. “Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.”

— R.F. Kuang

138. “The anger was a shield. The anger helped her to keep from remembering what she’d done. Because as long as she was angry, then it was okay – she’d acted within reason. She was afraid that if she stopped being angry, she might crack apart.”

— R.F. Kuang

139. “This is what I love about writing – it offers us endless opportunities to reinvent ourselves, and the stories we tell about ourselves. It lets us acknowledge every aspect of our heritage and history.”

— R.F. Kuang

140. “London was drab and grey; was exploding in colour; was a raucous din, bursting with life; was eerily quiet, haunted by ghosts and graveyards.”

— R.F. Kuang

141. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

143. “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

144. “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

145. “Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.”

— R.F. Kuang

146. “When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.”

— R.F. Kuang

147. “One did not spite one’s saviours.”

— R.F. Kuang

148. “People are attracted to power, darling. They can’t help themselves. Power seduces. Exert it, make a show of it, and they’ll follow you.”

— R.F. Kuang

149. “What a difference an accident of birth made.”

— R.F. Kuang

150. “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