Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

403. “The point of revenge wasn’t to heal. The point was that the exhilaration, however temporary, drowned out the hurt.”

— R.F. Kuang

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

409. “Kitay’s Sinegard was full of wonders, completely accessible, and crammed with things that belonged to him. Kitay’s Sinegard wasn’t terrifying, because Kitay had money. If he tripped, half the shop owners on the street would help him up, hoping for a handsome tip. If his pocket were cut, he’d go home and get another purse. Kitay could afford to be victimized by the city because he had room to fail.”

— R.F. Kuang

410. “The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”

— R.F. Kuang

411. “How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources.”

— R.F. Kuang

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

422. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

428. “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

429. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

431. “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

432. “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

433. “Never, Robin thought, would he understand these men, who talked of the world and its movements like a grand chess game, where countries and peoples were pieces to be moved and manipulated at will.”

— R.F. Kuang

434. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

436. “Westminster Bridge fell.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

439. “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

440. “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

441. “She’d been so stupid to once think that if she ended the Federation then she’d ended the hurting. 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

442. “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

443. “She wanted to forget everything, to forget the war, to forget her gods. It was enough to simply be, to know that her friends were alive and that the entire world was not so dark after all.”

— R.F. Kuang

444. “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

445. “Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.”

— R.F. Kuang

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “I just can’t write on a screen,” she’s told me. “I have to see it printed. Something about the reassuring solidity of the word. It feels permanent, like everything I compose has weight. It ties me down, it clarifies my thoughts and forces me to be specific.”

— R.F. Kuang

450. “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