Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

359. “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

360. “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

361. “They’d been lying to themselves for too long, he and his father. Things could not remain buried, hidden, and wilfully ignored forever. Sooner or later, things had to come to a head.”

— R.F. Kuang

362. “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

363. “Watching someone warp your image and tell your story however they choose, knowing you have no power to stop it? No voice? That’s how we all felt, watching you. Pretty awful, huh?”

— R.F. Kuang

364. “Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive.”

— R.F. Kuang

365. “This isn’t a garden,” she said. “This is a drug farm.” Now she really wanted to meet the Lore Master. Kitay sat down next to her. “You know, the great shamans of legend used to ingest drugs before battle. Gave them magical powers, so the stories say.” He smiled. “You think that’s what the Lore Master teaches?” “Honestly?” Rin picked at the grass. “I think he just comes in here to get high.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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. “For all her combat training, Rin had never thought about what it would be like to actually take someone’s life. To sever an artery, not just feign doing so.”

— R.F. Kuang

373. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

375. “Ramy, who had no choice but to stand out, had decided he might as well dazzle. He was bold to the extreme.”

— R.F. Kuang

376. “Awards don’t matter – at least, I am told this constantly by the people who regularly win them.”

— R.F. Kuang

377. “I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.”

— R.F. Kuang

378. “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

379. “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

380. “She knew with certainty that she’d lost Nezha forever.”

— R.F. Kuang

381. “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

382. “I think we’re about to be handed off,” Baji said. “It was nice knowing you all. Except you, Chaghan. You’re weird.”

— R.F. Kuang

383. “The subject of today’s lesson will be plants.” He sat down, pulled off his satchel, and emptied the contents onto the grass. Out spilled an assortment of plants and powders, the severed arm of a cactus, several bright red poppy flowers with pods still attached, and a handful of sun-dried mushrooms. “Are we getting high?” Rin said. “Oh, wow. We’re getting high, aren’t we?” “I’m getting high,” said Jiang. “You’re watching.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

390. “Hate was its own kind of fire and if you had nothing else, it kept you warm.”

— R.F. Kuang

391. “It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries.”

— R.F. Kuang

392. “Good test scores brought only momentary relief and temporary pride – she basked in her grace period of several hours before she began to panic about her next test.”

— R.F. Kuang

393. “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

394. “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

395. “Her shoulders crumpled. Robin held her tight against him. What an anchor she was, he thought, an anchor he did not deserve. She was his rock, his light, the sole presence that had kept him going. And he wished, he wished, that was enough for him to hold on to.”

— R.F. Kuang

396. “The trouble with writing an Oxford novel is that anyone who has spent time at Oxford will scrutinize your text to determine if your representation of Oxford aligns with their own memories of the place. Worse if you are an American writing about Oxford, for what do Americans know about anything?”

— R.F. Kuang

397. “If she wasn’t making the decisions, then nothing could be her fault.”

— R.F. Kuang

398. “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

399. “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

400. “He looked very sad then. “The age of the gods is over,” he said finally. “The Nikara may speak of shamans in their legends, but they cannot abide the prospect of the supernatural. To them, we are madmen.” He swallowed. “We are not madmen. But how can we convince anyone of this, when the rest of the world believes it so?”

— R.F. Kuang