Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.”

— R.F. Kuang

302. “Westminster Bridge fell.”

— R.F. Kuang

303. “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

304. “Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. But I don’t want to die, Robin.′ Her throat hitched. ‘I don’t want to die. 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

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

— R.F. Kuang

306. “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

307. “I don’t have yellow fever. I’m not one of those creepy dudes who write exclusively about Japanese folklore and wear kimonos and pronounce every loan word from Asian languages with a deliberate, constructed accent. Matcha. Otaku. I’m not obsessed with stealing Asian culture – I mean, before The Last Front, I had no interest in modern Chinese history whatsoever.”

— R.F. Kuang

308. “How could she compare the lives lost? One genocide against another – how did they balance on the scale of justice? And who was she, to imagine that she could make that comparison?”

— R.F. Kuang

309. “Tutor Feyrik’s eyes followed her eagerly as she slipped a hand into the satchel and drew out one heavy, sweet-smelling packet. Then another. And then another. “This is six tael worth of premium opium,” she said calmly. Six tael was half of what Tutor Feyrik might earn in an entire year. “You stole this from the Fangs,” he said uneasily. She shrugged. “Smuggling’s a difficult business. The Fangs know the risk. Packages go missing all the time. They can hardly report it to the magistrate.”

— R.F. Kuang

310. “But what had he ever promised her? Only wisdom. Only understanding. Enlightenment. But those meant only further warnings, petty excuses to hold her back from exercising a power that she knew she could access.”

— R.F. Kuang

311. “There is no historical precedent for this. The juncture is shot. History, for once, is fluid.”

— R.F. Kuang

312. “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

313. “Kitay’s Sinegard was full of wonders, completely accessible, and crammed with things that belonged to him. Kitay’s Sinegard wasn’t terrifying, because Kitay had money. If he tripped, half the shop owners on the street would help him up, hoping for a handsome tip. If his pocket were cut, he’d go home and get another purse. Kitay could afford to be victimized by the city because he had room to fail.”

— R.F. Kuang

314. “The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”

— R.F. Kuang

315. “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.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

317. “There’s plenty of brilliant madrasas in India,’ Ramy snapped. ‘What makes the English superior is guns. Guns, and the willingness to use them on innocent people.”

— R.F. Kuang

318. “Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?”

— R.F. Kuang

319. “Never, Robin thought, would he understand these men, who talked of the world and its movements like a grand chess game, where countries and peoples were pieces to be moved and manipulated at will.”

— R.F. Kuang

320. “If your opponent is of choleric temper, you should seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak so that he grows arrogant. The good tactician plays with his enemy like a cat plays with a mouse. Feign weakness and immobility, and then pounce on him.”

— R.F. Kuang

321. “If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.”

— R.F. Kuang

322. “We hold the secrets, and we can set whatever terms we like. That’s the beauty of being cleverer than everyone else.”

— R.F. Kuang

323. “Normally he would have delighted in finding out. But he was busy sulking, still both baffled and resentful at how he’d lost his friends in the process of trying to save them.”

— R.F. Kuang

324. “Did he owe Oxford his life, just because he had drunk champagne within its cloisters? Did he owe Babel his loyalty because he had once believed its lies?”

— R.F. Kuang

325. “Half a dozen peacocks, reportedly imported from London Zoo, wandered around the green, harassing anyone dressed in bright colours.”

— R.F. Kuang

326. “It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.”

— R.F. Kuang

327. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world.”

— R.F. Kuang

328. “The gods were simply those beings that inhabited that space, forces of creation and destruction, love and hatred, nurturing and neglect, light and dark, cold and warm... they opposed one another and complemented one another; they were fundamental truths.”

— R.F. Kuang

329. “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.”

— R.F. Kuang

330. “He learned when to flatter and when to engage in self-deprecation. He could have written a thesis on white pride, on white curiosity. He knew how to make himself an object of fascination while neutralizing himself as a threat.”

— R.F. Kuang

331. “I’m a sceptic. I think decolonization must be a violent process.”

— R.F. Kuang

332. “I will take my fugue state of delirious panic and compost it into a fertile bed of creativity – for aren’t all the best novels borne from some madness, which is borne from truth?”

— R.F. Kuang

333. “Between us, we have the fire and the water. I’m quite sure that together, we can take on the wind.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

335. “We’ll get rid of them.” “Then we’ll create another war,” said Kitay. “That’s what militaries do.”

— R.F. Kuang

336. “She had not always known the shape of him. She had loved the version of him she’d constructed for herself. She had admired him. She had idolized him. She adored an idea of him, an archetype, a version of him that was invulnerable.”

— R.F. Kuang

337. “The fire doesn’t give, the fire takes, and takes, and takes.”

— R.F. Kuang

338. “The silver industrial revolution had decimated both the textile and agricultural industries. The papers ran piece after piece exposing the horrific working conditions inside silver-powered factories.”

— R.F. Kuang

339. “If you were the victim, what could you say to make your tormentor recognize you as human? How did you get your enemy to recognize you at all?”

— R.F. Kuang

340. “You must conflate these concepts. The god outside you. The god within. Once you understand that these are one and the same, once you can hold both concepts in your head and know them to be true, you’ll be a shaman.”

— R.F. Kuang

341. “Don’t think about absolutes, think about the details. Every day, every hour that you can maintain an information asymmetry, you do it.”

— R.F. Kuang

342. “In the end, it was always so easy to kill her heart. It didn’t matter that they looked like boys. That they were nothing, nothing like the monsters she had once known. In this war of racial totality, none of that mattered. If they were Mugenese, that meant they were crickets and that meant when she crushed them under her heel, the universe hardly registered their loss.”

— R.F. Kuang

343. “He lectured as they climbed. “Martial arts came to the Empire by way of a warrior named Bodhidharma from the southeastern continent. When Bodhidharma found the Empire during his travels of the world, he journeyed to a monastery and demanded entry, but the head abbot refused him entrance. So Bodhidharma sat his ass in a nearby cave and faced the wall for nine years, listening to the ants scream.” “Listening to what?” “The ants scream, Runin. Keep up.”

— R.F. Kuang

344. “He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.”

— R.F. Kuang

345. “Follow along, feel free to have a look – books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless, so don’t be nervous.”

— R.F. Kuang

346. “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

347. “If there was one thing Rin had learned about her country’s history, it was that the only permanent thing about the Nikara Empire was war.”

— R.F. Kuang

348. “Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured.”

— R.F. Kuang

349. “I think I’d like to go frothing mad,” said Rin. “I’d like to lose my head. I think I’d be happier.”

— R.F. Kuang

350. “It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.”

— R.F. Kuang