Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

353. “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

354. “The national quest to modernize and mobilize entails a faith in one’s ability to control world order, and when that happens, you lose your connection with the gods. When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.”

— R.F. Kuang

355. “That’s your key to the gods. Hold that in your mind and never forget the way you’re feeling right now. That’s what gives you power. And that’s what is going to keep you human.”

— R.F. Kuang

356. “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

357. “She responds to all my emails within the day, often within the hour, and always in depth. She makes me feel like I matter. When she tells me this book will be a hit, I know that she means it.”

— R.F. Kuang

358. “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

359. “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

360. “But of course it was worth it. It was the only thing that was worth it. She had been fortunate to find a vocation that made irrelevant everything else, and anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships – anything that made you so inhumanly excited – had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.”

— R.F. Kuang

361. “Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.”

— R.F. Kuang

362. “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

363. “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

364. “But I need to survive this, somehow. And the truth would destroy me. So I simply must continue to live with this ghost, to grow accustomed to her face lingering on the backs of my eyelids. We must find some other equilibrium of coexistence that does not involve my giving her the only thing she wants.”

— R.F. Kuang

365. “Breathe for me. Can you do that? Breathe five times.” One. Two. Three. He continued to rub her back. “You just have to make it through the next five seconds. Then the next five. Then on and on.” Four. Five. And then another five. And those five, oddly enough, were just the littlest bit more bearable than the last.”

— R.F. Kuang

366. “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

367. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

369. “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

370. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you? I know why it’s hard for you. You like beating your classmates. You like harboring your old grudges. It feels good to hate, doesn’t it? Up until now you’ve been storing your anger up and using it as fuel. But unless you learn to let it go, you are never going to find your way to the gods.”

— R.F. Kuang

371. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

373. “She gazed at Peter and thought, ‘I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.”

— R.F. Kuang

374. “You’ve known Nezha for a few years,” he said. “You met him when he’d perfected his masks and pretensions. But I’ve known him since we were children. You think that he’s invincible, but he is more fragile than you think. Yes, I know he’s a prick. But I also know that he’d throw himself off a cliff for you. Please stop trying to break him.”

— R.F. Kuang

375. “But theirs had always been a broken country. It had never been unified, not truly; it had only ever been held tightly together by steel and blood, a facade of internal unity, while factions always threated to split from within. Rin had forced those tensions to the surface, and then to their breaking point. She’d forced the Nikara to confront the greatest lie it had ever told about itself – that there had been a united Nikara Empire at all.”

— R.F. Kuang

376. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

378. “He pulled her in against him so hard that she stiffened on instinct. Then she relaxed, because Nezha was so warm, so solid, and hugging him was such a wonderful feeling that she just wanted to bury her face into his uniform and stand there for a very long time.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

385. “Is it uncomfortable?’ Robin asked, trying valiantly to prove his own lack of prejudice. ‘Wearing trousers, I mean?’ ‘It’s not, in fact, since we have two legs and not fish tails.’ She extended her hand to him. ‘Victoire Desgraves.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

387. “What say you, then, To times, when half the city shall break out Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear? WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude.”

— R.F. Kuang

388. “We screamed back and forth a little more, relishing the other’s presence at the other end of the line, for it was so nice to know someone who understood this exact dream, who knew how mere words can become sentences can become a completed masterpiece, how that masterpiece can rocket you into a wholly unrecognizable world where you have everything – a world you wrote for yourself.”

— R.F. Kuang

389. “You might say karma is like a seed. Seeds grow into fruit. Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted.”

— R.F. Kuang

390. “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

391. “It’s a vicious circle of profit, and unless some outside force breaks the cycle, sooner or later Britain will possess all the wealth in the world.”

— R.F. Kuang

392. “You can’t kill a movement.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

394. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

396. “If this organizational competence strikes one as surprising, remember that both Babel and the British government made a great mistake in assuming all antisilver movements of the century were spontaneous riots carried out by uneducated, discontented lowlifes.”

— R.F. Kuang

397. “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

398. “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

399. “She couldn’t show that pain to anyone else until she’d perfected the way she wanted to tell it, until she had complete control over the narrative.”

— R.F. Kuang

400. “We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry.”

— R.F. Kuang