Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Most authors are pickier about killing their darlings.”

— R.F. Kuang

352. “As a child she knew her motherland as a place of violence and barbaric power struggles, for that is how they spoke of it in France, and that was what her exiled mother chose to believe. ‘We are lucky,’ whispered her mother, ‘that we survived it.’ But her mother did not survive France.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

354. “She glanced down at the basin with a deranged satisfaction. Better to get the blood out this way, she thought, all at once, rather than slowly, every month, for years. While she continued to retch, she heard the door to the dormitory open. Someone walked inside and paused in front of her. “You’re insane,” said Venka. Rin glared up at her, blood dripping from her mouth, and smiled.”

— R.F. Kuang

355. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

357. “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

358. “She could not abide the terrible guilt of it, so she closed her mind off to the reality. She burned away the part of her that would have felt remorse for those deaths, because if she felt them, if she felt each and every single one of them, it would have torn her apart. The lives were so many that she ceased to acknowledge them for what they were.”

— R.F. Kuang

359. “She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.”

— R.F. Kuang

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges.”

— R.F. Kuang

365. “For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘She was only just a woman.”

— R.F. Kuang

366. “Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them.”

— R.F. Kuang

367. “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

368. “The publisher might then hire a Black sensitivity reader to check whether the textual representations are consciously, or unconsciously, racist. They’ve gotten more and more popular in the past few years, as more and more white authors have been criticized for employing racist tropes and stereotypes.”

— R.F. Kuang

369. “At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English.”

— R.F. Kuang

370. “So far, her novels had presented linear narratives, all told in the past tense from the third person perspective of the singular protagonist. But here, Athena does something similar to what Christopher Nolan does in the movie Dunkirk. Instead of following one particular story, she layers disparate narratives and perspectives together to form a moving mosaic, a crowd crying out in unison.”

— R.F. Kuang

371. “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

372. “She squeezed her wrist, fingers closing over pale burn scars, and inhaled. Focus. In the corner, a water clock rang softly. “Begin,” said the examiner. A hundred test booklets were opened with a flapping noise, like a flock of sparrows taking off at once.”

— R.F. Kuang

373. “You walk up the aisle in a dress that doesn’t fit you. You’re trembling. He’s waiting at the other end. He looks at you like you’re a juicy, fattened pig, a marbled slab of meat for his purchase. He spreads saliva over his dry lips. He doesn’t look away from you throughout the entire banquet. When it’s over, he carries you to his bedroom. He pushes you onto the sheets. She shuddered. Squeezed her eyes shut. Reopened them and found her place on the page.”

— R.F. Kuang

374. “Under that frail veneer of control was an ongoing scream of rage that originated in confusion and culminated in an overwhelming urge for destruction, if only so he could tear the world down and rebuild it in a way that made sense.”

— R.F. Kuang

375. “She no longer fought from pure rage. She fought to protect him – and that, she had discovered, changed everything.”

— R.F. Kuang

376. “To travel alone over the Empire’s vast roads was a good way to get robbed, murdered, or eaten. Sometimes all three – and sometimes not in that order.”

— R.F. Kuang

377. “You just have to make it through the next five seconds. Then the next five. Then on and on.”

— R.F. Kuang

378. “I can keep up with your students if you just let me try. I don’t even have to attend recitation. I just need books.”

— R.F. Kuang

379. “Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘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

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

— R.F. Kuang

381. “Compromise required some acknowledgement that the other party deserved equal moral standing.”

— R.F. Kuang

382. “But I’ve no clue what I have to offer her – I don’t possess anywhere near the clout, the popularity, or the connections to make the time she spends with me worthwhile.”

— R.F. Kuang

383. “She could think of no questions that were not inane. ‘Are you alright?’ Of course Venka was not alright. ‘How did you survive?’ By having the body of a woman. ‘What happened to you?’ But she already knew.”

— R.F. Kuang

384. “Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. 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

385. “I know the vision you dreamed of for this nation and I know I may have destroyed it. But my first obligation is not to the unborn people of this country’s future, but the people who are suffering now, who pass their days in fear because of the war that you have brought to their doorstep.”

— R.F. Kuang

386. “It’s not about who you are, it’s about how they see you. And once you’re mud in this country, you’re always mud.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

388. “Kitay could afford to be victimized by the city because he had room to fail.”

— R.F. Kuang

389. “Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually.”

— R.F. Kuang

390. “Sir, I just want to learn to be a good soldier,” she said. Jiang’s face fell. “You and the rest of this school,” he said.”

— R.F. Kuang

391. “Victoire lifted her hand. ‘Is the tower – ’ ‘Larger on the inside than it seems on the outside?’ Anthony asked. ‘Indeed.’ Robin.”

— R.F. Kuang

392. “It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away. One.”

— R.F. Kuang

393. “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

394. “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

395. “He put the volume down, struck with the unsettling realization that Professor Lovell – a foreigner – knew more about his mother tongue than he did.”

— R.F. Kuang

396. “For Athena, the Netflix deal was not a life-changing event, just another feather in her cap, one of the side perks of the road to literary stardom she’s been hurtling down since graduation.”

— R.F. Kuang

397. “The Federation soldiers don’t feel anything.” Kitay nodded in agreement. “They don’t think of themselves as people. They are parts of a machine. They do as they are commanded, and the only time they feel joy is when reveling in another person’s suffering. There is no reasoning with them. There is not attempting to understand them. They are accustomed to propagating such grotesque evil that they cannot properly be called human.”

— R.F. Kuang

398. “What a difference an accident of birth made.”

— R.F. Kuang

399. “Hello, little one, said the Phoenix.”

— R.F. Kuang

400. “Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped toward the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp, their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright.”

— R.F. Kuang