Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

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

— R.F. Kuang

302. “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

303. “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

304. “If she let it linger, then she started to drown, and the only way to make those feelings stop was to burn instead.”

— R.F. Kuang

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “Anger, pain, and hatred – that was all kindling for a great and terrible power, and it had been festering in the south for a very long time.”

— R.F. Kuang

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “This is what you have to tell yourself,” Qara said fiercely. “You have to believe that it was necessary. That it stopped something worse. And even if it wasn’t, it’s the lie we’ll tell ourselves, starting today and every day afterward. You made your choice. There’s nothing you can do about it now. It’s over.”

— R.F. Kuang

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

323. “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

324. “If you sanction it, you’ll horrify them. If you denounce it, they’ll resent you. But if you keep quiet, you get plausible deniability.”

— R.F. Kuang

325. “Children can be murderers... Little boys can be monsters.”

— R.F. Kuang

326. “But this was going to happen every month. Every gods-damned month her uterus would tear itself to pieces, send flashes of rage throughout her entire body, and make her bloated, clumsy, and light-headed, and worst of all, weak.”

— R.F. Kuang

327. “Our world is a dream of the gods. Maybe they have other dreams. But all we have is this story unfolding, and in the script of this world, nothing’s going to bring Altan back to life.”

— R.F. Kuang

328. “You think too highly of mortals. They give nothing to the universe, and the universe owes them nothing in return.”

— R.F. Kuang

329. “They want to erase us. It’s their divine mandate. They want to make us better, to improve us, by turning us into a mirror of themselves.”

— R.F. Kuang

330. “Because they’re crammed on that tiny island and they think Nikan should be theirs. Because they fought us before and they almost won,” Rin said curtly. “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

331. “I don’t need to impress him. I’m impressive enough as is.”

— R.F. Kuang

332. “Because if she could just erase her past, then she could write herself into whoever she wanted to be in the present. Student. Scholar. Soldier. Anything except who she used to be.”

— R.F. Kuang

333. “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

334. “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

335. “He was like a sword that had been sharpened, metal that had been tempered.”

— R.F. Kuang

336. “I’ve written myself into a corner. The first two-thirds of the book were a breeze to compose, but what do I do with the ending? Where do I leave my protagonist, now that there’s a hungry ghost in the mix, and no clear resolution?”

— R.F. Kuang

337. “Dying was easy. Living was so much harder – that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her.”

— R.F. Kuang

338. “Language is a resource just like gold and silver.”

— R.F. Kuang

339. “But eventually, you’ll have to ask yourself precisely what you’re fighting for. And you’ll have to find a reason to live past vengeance.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

341. “The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.”

— R.F. Kuang

342. “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

343. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

345. “Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.”

— R.F. Kuang

346. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, obviously, but the internet is very bad at recognizing this.”

— R.F. Kuang

347. “You don’t fix hurts by pretending they never happened. You treat them like infected wounds. You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

349. “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

350. “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