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

201. “Violence shows how much we’re willing to give up.”

— R.F. Kuang

202. “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

203. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

205. “Shamans should know when to resist the power of the gods. That is wisdom. But rulers should do everything in their power to save their country. That is responsibility. If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own.”

— R.F. Kuang

206. “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

207. “The tides of history had shifted. She had never before believed in fate, but this she came to know with more and more certainty as each day passed: the script of the world was now wholly, inalterably colored by a brilliant crimson streak.”

— R.F. Kuang

208. “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

209. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.” “I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?” “Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”

— R.F. Kuang

210. “Amateurs obsessed over strategy, and professionals obsessed over logistics.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

212. “She terrifies him, and he loves her so much it hurts.”

— R.F. Kuang

213. “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

214. “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

215. “It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam.”

— R.F. Kuang

216. “Like Babel, the Old Library was much larger on the inside than its exterior suggested. From.”

— R.F. Kuang

217. “Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected. They never let her talk about anything other than being an immigrant, other than the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen. Racial trauma sells, right? They treated her like a museum.”

— R.F. Kuang

218. “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

219. “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

220. “She has no illusions about what she will encounter. She knows she will face immeasurable cruelty. She knows her greatest obstacle will be cold indifference, born of a bone-deep investment in an economic system that privileges some and crushes others.”

— R.F. Kuang

221. “His fighting technique was a study in trigonometry, a beautiful composition of trajectories and rebounded forces. He won consistently because he had perfect control of distance and torque. He had the mathematics of fighting down to a science.”

— R.F. Kuang

222. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

225. “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

226. “Latin, translation theory, etymology, focus languages, and a new research language – it was an absurdly heavy class load, especially when each professor assigned coursework as if none of the other courses existed. The faculty was utterly unsympathetic.”

— R.F. Kuang

227. “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

228. “At Sinegard, Strategy Master Irjah had taught them once that during the heat of battle, they should regard their opponents as objects, abstract and disparate parts and not the sum, because that would make it easier to plunge a blade into a pumping heart. But maybe if you looked at someone as not an object but an animal, you could not only commit the murder without flinching, you could let yourself take some pleasure in it. Then it felt good, the same way kicking down anthills felt good.”

— R.F. Kuang

229. “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

230. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.”

— R.F. Kuang

236. “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

237. “The great empires of the waking world were driven so mad by what they had forgotten that they decided to slaughter the only people who could still dream.”

— R.F. Kuang

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “Heuristics will do for the unenlightened.” “You mean easy moral rules for people who are too dumb to understand why they matter.”

— R.F. Kuang

243. “If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.”

— R.F. Kuang

244. “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

245. “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

246. “The snow was lovely to observe for all of two serene minutes. Then it became nothing but a pain in the ass.”

— R.F. Kuang

247. “But Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative.”

— R.F. Kuang

248. “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

249. “He loves her laugh; that sharp, sudden sound; the cynical laugh that always comes too quick, like it’s ripped out of her. He loves her quick, confident grin. He loves her resilience, her bravery, even her impulsiveness. She’s everything he’s not: unbound, reckless, free. He’s never known anyone like her. She terrifies him, and he loves her so much it hurts.”

— R.F. Kuang

250. “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