Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re keys to civilizations. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.”

— R.F. Kuang

154. “How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?”

— R.F. Kuang

155. “Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.”

— R.F. Kuang

156. “For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.”

— R.F. Kuang

157. “The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.”

— R.F. Kuang

158. “Let them think of us as dirt, Rin thought. She was dirt. Her army was dirt. But dirt was common, ubiquitous, and patient, and necessary. The soil gave life to the country. And the earth always reclaimed what it was owed.”

— R.F. Kuang

159. “Your kind has been treated as slaves for so long that you’ve forgotten what it is like to be free. You’re easily angered, and you latch quickly onto things – opium, people, ideas – that soothe your pain, even temporarily. And that makes you terribly easy to manipulate.”

— R.F. Kuang

160. “Have you ever wondered the mechanics of popularization? How does someone go from being a real person, someone you actually knew, to a set of marketing and publicity points, consumed and lauded by fans who think they know them, but don’t really, but understand this also, and celebrate them regardless?”

— R.F. Kuang

161. “We are foreign because this nation has marked us so, and as long as we’re punished daily for our ties to our homelands, we might as well defend them. No, Letty, we can’t maintain this fantasy. The only one who can do that is you.”

— R.F. Kuang

162. “Two hours in the cab brought them to a village called Hampstead several miles north of London proper, where Professor Lovell owned a four-storey house made of pale red brick and white stucco, surrounded by a generous swath of neat green shrubbery.”

— R.F. Kuang

163. “You will die thinking I have abandoned you all. But I do not hesitate to say that I value the lives of my people far more than I have ever valued you.”

— R.F. Kuang

164. “Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose.”

— R.F. Kuang

165. “Rin was so tired of having to prove her humanity.”

— R.F. Kuang

166. “It wasn’t about surrender. It was about the long game. It was about survival.”

— R.F. Kuang

167. “What more can we want as writers than such immortality? Don’t ghosts just want to be remembered?”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

169. “Tonight was a borrowed grace, innocent of the future. They sat in miserable and desperate silence, wishing and regretting while the bloody moon traced its ponderous path across the sky.”

— R.F. Kuang

170. “This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.”

— R.F. Kuang

171. “She began to burn herself again. She found release in the pain; it was comforting, familiar. It was a trade-off she was well used to. Success required sacrifice. Sacrifice meant pain. Pain meant success.”

— R.F. Kuang

172. “There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.”

— R.F. Kuang

173. “He learned he had the Roman Catholics to thank for his favourite almond cheesecakes, for the prohibition of dairy during fast days had forced English cooks to innovate with almond milk.”

— R.F. Kuang

174. “But ideological purity is a battle cry, it’s not the stable foundation for a unified country. A nation means nothing if it can’t provide for the people in it. You have to act for their sake.”

— R.F. Kuang

175. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.”

— R.F. Kuang

182. “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

183. “Maybe no one was truly a beast. Maybe that was just how murder became possible. You took away someone’s humanity, and then you killed them.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

186. “Rin forced the last parts of what was human out of her soul and gave way to her hatred. Hating was so easy. It filled a hole inside her. It let her feel something again. It felt so good.”

— R.F. Kuang

187. “I can’t ignore the damage. I have to track the exact trajectory of the hurricane, because knowing the precise moment it’ll hit and where will make things hurt less. At least, my brain is convinced this is so.”

— R.F. Kuang

188. “I needed you – Altan needed you – and all you did was, was – ” Jiang spoke so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him. “I couldn’t save Altan.” Her voice broke. “But you could have saved me.” He looked stricken. For once he had no quippy retort, no excuse or deflection.”

— R.F. Kuang

189. “But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage.”

— R.F. Kuang

190. “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

191. “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

192. “Books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless.”

— R.F. Kuang

193. “He had no understanding of class then, or of race. He thought it was all a game. He did not see his father watching from around the corner, eyebrows knitted with worry. He did not know that impressing a white man could be as dangerous as provoking one.”

— R.F. Kuang

194. “I’ve reached behind the canvas, she thought. And now I hold the brush.”

— R.F. Kuang

195. “Writing isn’t the whole world, Junie. And there’s plenty of careers that won’t give you such constant heartbreak. That’s all I’m saying.” But writing is the whole world. How can I explain this to her?”

— R.F. Kuang

196. “What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”

— R.F. Kuang

197. “God, I miss my high school days, when I could flip my notebook open to an empty page and see possibility instead of frustration. When I took real pleasure in stringing words and sentences together just to see how they sounded. When writing was an act of sheer imagination, of taking myself away somewhere else, of creating something that was only for me.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

199. “That none of my beliefs about the world were true. That reality is malleable. That hidden connections exist in every living object. That the whole of the world is merely a thought, a butterfly’s dream.”

— R.F. Kuang

200. “But I can’t quit the one thing that gives meaning to my life. Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me.”

— R.F. Kuang