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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Words and phrases you think are carved into your bones can disappear in no time.”

— R.F. Kuang

155. “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

156. “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

157. “Ramy slept on the floor beside Robin, body curled around the couch like protective parenthesis. The sight of them all together made Robin’s chest ache.”

— R.F. Kuang

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

166. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

173. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

175. “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

176. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

185. “In the years to come, Robin would return so many times to this night. He was forever astonished by its mysterious alchemy, by how easily two badly socialized, restrictively raised strangers had transformed into kindred spirits in a span of minutes.”

— R.F. Kuang

186. “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

187. “Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

189. “History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it.”

— R.F. Kuang

190. “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

191. “I don’t believe in gods,” said Rin. “But I believe in power.”

— R.F. Kuang

192. “Balderdash,’ he would drawl slowly, ‘is a word which used to refer to the cursed concoction created by bartenders when they’d nearly run out of every drink at the end of the night. Ale, wine, cider, milk – they’d dump it all in and hope their patrons wouldn’t mind, since after all the goal was simply to get drunk. But this is Oxford University, not the Turf Tavern after midnight, and we are in need of something slightly more illuminating than getting sloshed. Would you like to try again?”

— R.F. Kuang

193. “But the best revenge is to thrive.”

— R.F. Kuang

194. “There would be no truce or negotiation tonight. Tonight was a borrowed grace, innocent of the future.”

— R.F. Kuang

195. “If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, thought Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come – not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations.”

— R.F. Kuang

196. “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

197. “If you’re focused only on your enemy’s weapon, you’ll always be on the defensive. Look past the weapon to your target. Focus on what you want to kill.”

— R.F. Kuang

198. “No one would lift a weapon. No one would fight or flee. Just this night, just this moment, they had entered a liminal space where their past and future did not matter, where they could be the children they used to be.”

— R.F. Kuang

199. “It’s hard, after all, to be friends with someone who outshines you at every turn.”

— R.F. Kuang

200. “For it was wonderful to remember that this land could still be so breathtakingly beautiful, that there was more sewn into the heart of the Twelve Provinces than blood and steel and dirt. That centuries of warfare later, this country was still a canvas for the gods, that their celestial essence still seeped through the cracks between worlds.”

— R.F. Kuang