Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “Etymology is detective work across centuries, and it’s devilishly hard work, like finding a needle in a haystack.”

— R.F. Kuang

202. “I’ve got quite a big family there. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually royalty, fourth in line to the throne – what throne? Oh, just a regional one; our political system is very complicated. But I wanted to experience a normal life – get a proper British education, you know – so I’ve left my palace for here.”

— R.F. Kuang

203. “Pamphlets. They’d thought they could win this with pamphlets. He almost laughed at the absurdity. Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”

— R.F. Kuang

204. “She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

206. “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

207. “It’s hard for me to really feel sorry for Geoff. This is, after all, the same man who once threatened to leak nudes of Athena on Reddit if she didn’t back him up against a Locus reviewer.”

— R.F. Kuang

208. “I sometimes wonder how my work would be received if I pretended to be a man, or a white woman. The text could be exactly the same, but one might be a critical bomb and the other a resounding success. Why is that?”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

210. “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

211. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “We don’t die so much as we return to the void. We dissolve. We lose our ego. We change from being just one thing to becoming everything. Most of us, at least.”

— R.F. Kuang

220. “Don’t we all want a friend who won’t ever challenge our superiority, because they already know it’s a lost cause? Don’t we all need someone we can treat as a punching bag?”

— R.F. Kuang

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “We have to die to get their pity. We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. I don’t want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko. I don’t want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.”

— R.F. Kuang

225. “She remembered the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Nezha, and then all the times thereafter. It hurt to see him. It hurt so much.”

— R.F. Kuang

226. “But the answer was obvious- that they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.”

— R.F. Kuang

227. “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

228. “How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.”

— R.F. Kuang

229. “London was voracious, was growing fat on its spoils and still, somehow, starved.”

— R.F. Kuang

230. “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

231. “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

232. “It is astounding, in truth, how much of academia’s perceived resource scarcity is artificially constructed.”

— R.F. Kuang

233. “They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.”

— R.F. Kuang

234. “What you don’t get to do is to remain neutral.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

236. “Call off your men, or I will summon into existence things that should not be in this world.”

— R.F. Kuang

237. “That’s cute,” she said with as much calm as she could manage.”

— R.F. Kuang

238. “She’s using the pen name Juniper Song to pretend to be Chinese American. She’s taken new author photos to look more tan and ethnic, but she’s as white as they come. June Hayward, you are a thief and a liar. You’ve stolen my legacy, and now you spit on my grave.”

— R.F. Kuang

239. “Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics.”

— R.F. Kuang

240. “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

241. “In the mid-eighteenth century, Babel scholars were briefly seized by an astrology fad, and several state-of-the-art telescopes were ordered for the roof on behalf of scholars who thought they could derive useful match-pairs from the names of star signs. These efforts never yielded anything interesting, as astrology is fake, but the stargazing was pleasant.”

— R.F. Kuang

242. “The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.”

— R.F. Kuang

243. “Most of the accounts that participate so clearly do not care about the truth. They’re here for the entertainment. These people love to have a target, and they’ll tear apart anything you put in front of them.”

— R.F. Kuang

244. “But that’s not how things work, brother. This is not a penny dreadful. Real life is messy, scary, and uncertain.”

— R.F. Kuang

245. “The gods do not want anything. The gods merely exist. We cannot help what we are; we are pure essence, pure element. You humans inflict everything on yourselves, and then blame us afterward. Every calamity has been man-made. We do not force you to do anything. We have only ever helped.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

247. “You see, my colleagues in there are still holding on to this unbelievable faith in human goodness.’ Griffin cocked the gun and pointed it at a birch tree across the yard. ‘But I’m a sceptic. I think decolonization must be a violent process.”

— R.F. Kuang

248. “And once you’ve turned your world to ash, you’ll wish you could die.”

— R.F. Kuang

249. “Praise meant that she had finally, finally received validation that she was not nothing. She could be brilliant, could be worth someone’s attention. She adored praise – craved it, needed it, and realized she found relief only when she finally had it.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang