Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “All these years trying to find a way to kill himself, and here’s someone who might actually finish the job. And somehow, paradoxically, this is the most he’s ever wanted to be alive. This is the first time in an eternity that he doesn’t feel like he’s drowning.”

— R.F. Kuang

302. “What is this?” “It’s the Bone-Burning Fire Oil Magic Bomb,” Ramsa said. “New model.” “Cool.” Suni leaned toward the bag. “What’s in it?” “Tung oil, sal ammoniac, scallion juice, and feces.” Ramsa rattled off the ingredients with relish. Altan looked faintly alarmed. “Whose feces?” “That’s not important,” Ramsa said hastily.”

— R.F. Kuang

303. “They had a god to kill. A world to reshape. An Empress to overthrow.”

— R.F. Kuang

304. “Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?”

— R.F. Kuang

305. “What you don’t understand,’ said Ramy, ’is how much people like you will excuse if it just means they can get tea and coffee on their breakfast tables. They don’t care, Letty. They just don’t care.”

— R.F. Kuang

306. “Hate was a funny thing. It gnawed at her insides like poison. It made every muscle in her body tense, made her veins boil so hot she thought her head might split in half, and yet it fueled everything she did. Hate was its own kind of fire and if you had nothing else, it kept you warm.”

— R.F. Kuang

307. “Unnatural criminals,” she said slowly, “who have committed unnatural crimes?”

— R.F. Kuang

308. “It was all such frippery, fluff, trivial distractions built over a foundation of ongoing, unimaginable cruelty.”

— R.F. Kuang

309. “Your country is ash. You can’t bring it back with blood.”

— R.F. Kuang

310. “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

311. “You never want to hurt them. But you have to. You have to put them through hell, because that’s the only way anyone else will survive.”

— R.F. Kuang

312. “I’ll show you all one last blow,” Kureel announced as the session drew to a close. “This is the only kick you’ll ever need, really. A kick to bring down the most powerful warriors.” Jeeha blinked in confusion. He turned his head to ask her what she meant. And Kureel raised her knee and jammed the ball of her foot into Jeeha’s groin.”

— R.F. Kuang

313. “War didn’t end, not so cleanly – it just kept building up in little hurts that piled on one another until they exploded afresh into raw new wounds.”

— R.F. Kuang

314. “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

315. “The Persian word farang, which was used to refer to Europeans, appeared to be a cognate of the English foreign. But farang actually arose from a reference to the Franks, and morphed to encompass Western Europeans.”

— R.F. Kuang

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “Rin let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.”

— R.F. Kuang

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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.”

— R.F. Kuang

323. “He ploughed through before his tears could catch up. ‘I want to believe in the future we’re fighting for, but it’s not there, it’s just not there, and I can’t take things day by day when I’m too horrified by the thought of tomorrow. I’m underwater. And I’ve been underwater for so long, and I a way out, but couldn’t find one that didn’t feel like some – some great abdication of responsibility.”

— R.F. Kuang

324. “It hurt too much to consider the truth. It was so much easier to pretend; to keep spinning the fantasy for as long as they could.”

— R.F. Kuang

325. “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

326. “A master leaving the grounds alone with a student. I wonder what they’ll say.” Jun narrowed his eyes. “Probably that a master of his rank and standing could do much better than dicking around with female students,” Jiang replied cheerfully, looking directly at Jun’s apprentices. Kureel looked outraged.”

— R.F. Kuang

327. “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

328. “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

329. “The Seer took his hand. Brought it to his lips and kissed it.”

— R.F. Kuang

330. “It’s like pressing a bleeding sore repeatedly, trying to see how far you can go with your tolerance for pain, because if you know the limits of it, you gain some sense of control over it.”

— R.F. Kuang

331. “We have one of those skin-deep friendships where you manage to spend a lot of time together without really getting to know the other person.”

— R.F. Kuang

332. “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

333. “This is a test, and Rin is failing, and his heart is breaking.”

— R.F. Kuang

334. “It was like an exercise in hope’, she said after a pause. ‘Loving her, I mean. Sometimes I’d think she’d come around. Sometimes I’d look her in the eyes and think that I was looking at a true friend. Then she’d say something, make some off-the-cuff comment, and the whole cycle would begin all over again. It was like pouring sand into a sieve. Nothing stuck.”

— R.F. Kuang

335. “Meals became silent and reserved affairs. Everyone ate with a book held before his or her nose. If any students ventured to strike up a conversation, the rest of the table quickly and violently shushed them. In short, they made themselves miserable. “Sometimes I think this is as bad as the Speer Massacre,” Kitay said cheerfully. “And then I think – nah. Nothing is as bad as the casual genocide of an entire race! But this is pretty bad.” “Kitay, please shut up.”

— R.F. Kuang

336. “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

337. “Meditation felt like a massive waste of time to Rin, who was used to years of stress and constant studying. It felt wrong to be sitting so still, to have nothing occupying her mind. She could barely stand three minutes of this torture, let alone sixty. She was so terrified of the thought of not thinking that she wasn’t able to accomplish it because she kept thinking about not thinking.”

— R.F. Kuang

338. “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

339. “The matches aren’t about winning, they’re about demonstrating new techniques. What are you going to do, light up in front of the entire student body?”

— R.F. Kuang

340. “Come back down,” he said, his expression suddenly grim. His fingers clenched tight around hers. “Listen, Rin. I don’t care what else happens up there. But you come back to me.”

— R.F. Kuang

341. “I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.”

— R.F. Kuang

342. “Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign peoples that brings wealth and prosperity to all.”

— R.F. Kuang

343. “She was mortal after all, they’re thinking. She was just like us. And in destroying her, we create an audience; we create moral authority for ourselves.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

345. “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

346. “What happened to you was common in the era before the Red Emperor, back when Nikara shamans didn’t know what they were doing. If this had continued, you would have gone mad. But I am here to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m going to keep you sane.” Rin wondered how someone who regularly strolled through campus without clothes on could say that with a straight face.”

— R.F. Kuang

347. “She was a goddess. She was a monster. She‘d nearly destroyed this country. And then she‘d given it one last, gasping chance to live.”

— R.F. Kuang

348. “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

349. “They believe in a singular and all-powerful deity, which means they cannot accept the truth of other gods. And when nations start to believe that other beliefs lead to damnation, violence becomes inevitable.”

— R.F. Kuang

350. “I have a name,’ said the boy. ‘It’s – ’ ‘No, that won’t do. No Englishman can pronounce that. Did Miss Slate give you a name?”

— R.F. Kuang