Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine hot the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.”

— R.F. Kuang

352. “The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.”

— R.F. Kuang

353. “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

354. “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

355. “She passed her time sleeping. She wanted to sleep all the time now, especially after meals, and when she did it was a heavy and dreamless sleep. She wondered if her food and drink were drugged. Somehow, she was almost grateful for this. It was worse to be alone with her thoughts.”

— R.F. Kuang

356. “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

357. “He learned that being English was not the same as being British, though he was still hard-pressed to articulate the difference between the two.”

— R.F. Kuang

358. “Recalling Professor Lovell’s words, he tried very hard to live exclusively in English. When thoughts popped up in Chinese, he quashed them.”

— R.F. Kuang

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

369. “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

370. “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

371. “He had just learned about Platonic forms, and was convinced scones were the Platonic ideal of bread.”

— R.F. Kuang

372. “All our silver goes to luxury, to the military, to making lace and weapons when there are people dying of simple things these bars could fix. It’s not right that you recruit students from other countries to work your translation centre and that their motherlands receive nothing in return.”

— R.F. Kuang

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “The great empires of the waking world were driven so mad by what they had forgotten that they decided to slaughter the only people who could still dream.”

— R.F. Kuang

377. “I dub historical exploitation novels: inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.”

— R.F. Kuang

378. “You’re easily angered, and you latch quickly onto things – opium, people, ideas – that soothe your pain, even temporarily. And that makes you terribly easy to manipulate.” Chaghan.”

— R.F. Kuang

379. “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

380. “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

381. “It all reeks of desperation, but I can’t look away. It’s the only thing linking me to the only world I have any interest in being at part of.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

383. “Survival’s not that difficult, Birdie.’ Ramy’s eyes were very hard. ‘But you’ve got to maintain some dignity while you’re at it.”

— R.F. Kuang

384. “London was voracious, was growing fat on its spoils and still, somehow, starved. London was both unimaginably rich and wretchedly poor. London – lovely, ugly, sprawling, cramped, belching, sniffing, virtuous, hypocritical, silver-gilded London – was near to a reckoning, for the day would come when it either devoured itself from the inside or cast outwards for new delicacies, labour, capital, and culture on which to feed.”

— R.F. Kuang

385. “Her fans praise such tactics as brilliant and authentic – a diaspora writer’s necessary intervention against the whiteness of English. But it’s not good craft. It makes the prose frustrating and inaccessible. I am convinced it is all in service of making Athena, and her readers, feel smarter than they are.”

— R.F. Kuang

386. “Well, then. I’m at your service, Commander.”

— R.F. Kuang

387. “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

388. “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

389. “Or maybe, she thought, with stars this bright, if you believed that above you lay the cosmos, then you had to construct a yurt to provide some temporary feeling of materiality. Otherwise, under the weight of swirling divinity, you might feel you had no significance at all.”

— R.F. Kuang

390. “No one had ever been able to deny Mingzha anything. Who could? He was so fat and happy, a bouncing ball of giggles and delight, the absolute treasure of the palace.”

— R.F. Kuang

391. “Brett emails me with updates on foreign rights. We’ve sold rights in Germany, Spain, Poland, and Russia. Not France, yet, but we’re working on it, says Brett. But nobody sells well in France. If the French like you, then you’re doing something very wrong.”

— R.F. Kuang

392. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

394. “She was all of herself. She was whole, intact.”

— R.F. Kuang

395. “Westminster Bridge fell.”

— R.F. Kuang

396. “The problem is that we’re always living like we’re lost.”

— R.F. Kuang

397. “He could read the language better than he spoke it. Ever since the boy turned four, he had received a large parcel twice a year filled entirely with books written in English. The return address was a residence in Hampstead just outside London – a place Miss Betty seemed unfamiliar with, and which the boy of course knew nothing about.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

399. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang