Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

404. “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

405. “This life you’ve chosen, you won’t get many moments like this again. But it’s the nights like this that keep you alive. All you think about is who you’re fighting against. But that? That’s what you’re fighting for.”

— R.F. Kuang

406. “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

407. “Then it became nothing but a pain in the ass.”

— R.F. Kuang

408. “Jiang forced her mind to expand outward into entirely new dimensions.”

— R.F. Kuang

409. “Unnatural criminals,” she said slowly, “who have committed unnatural crimes?”

— R.F. Kuang

410. “Of course she wasn’t happy, not quite. But she had found some sort of contentment, the satisfaction that came from being a tool that served its purpose quite well.”

— R.F. Kuang

411. “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

412. “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

413. “It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.”

— R.F. Kuang

414. “Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

416. “Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical. He was bleeding, but he didn’t know where from.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

418. “We are not madmen. But how can we convince anyone of this, when the rest of the world believes it so?”

— R.F. Kuang

419. “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

420. “It is about the most fundamental truths about each and every one of us, how we relate to the phenomenon of existence. Of course it is imprecise. If we understood it completely, then we would be gods.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

422. “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

423. “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

424. “The world turned upside down. Britain was spilling its own blood, Britain was gouging out its own flesh, and nothing after this could go back to the way it had been before.”

— R.F. Kuang

425. “But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism. It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.”

— R.F. Kuang

426. “Awake and asleep, he examined the same moment from a thousand different angles until he truly no longer knew what had happened. He wanted all thoughts to stop. He wanted to disappear.”

— R.F. Kuang

427. “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

428. “Neither of my parents are, um, Asian.” I want to die. I want to open the car door and roll out onto the highway and be obliterated by oncoming traffic.”

— R.F. Kuang

429. “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

430. “Someone else tweets a photo of me taken off my Instagram paired with a photo of Scarlett Johansson, captioned: Corporate wants you to find the differences between these two images LMAO.”

— R.F. Kuang

431. “No one’s hugged me in so long.”

— R.F. Kuang

432. “But she had seen and suffered too much. The Empire didn’t need someone reasonable. It needed someone mad enough to try and save it.”

— R.F. Kuang

433. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

435. “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

436. “Weird things,” she said. “We’re studying very weird things.” Jiang raised an eyebrow. “How articulate.”

— R.F. Kuang

437. “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

438. “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

439. “The snow was lovely to observe for all of two serene minutes. Then it became nothing but a pain in the ass.”

— R.F. Kuang

440. “The enormous variety of techniques, some of which were only marginally useful to a soldier, were distilled into an essential core of forms that could be taught to a soldier in five years rather than fifty. This is the basis of what you are taught at Sinegard. This is the common core that is taught to the Imperial Militia. This is what your classmates are learning.” He grinned. “I am showing you how to beat it.”

— R.F. Kuang

441. “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

442. “He could have cried then. He’d been so desperately lonely, and had only now realized it, and now he wasn’t, and this felt so good he didn’t know what to do with himself.”

— R.F. Kuang

443. “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

444. “We’ve actually figured out the key to the transformation of a thing. It’s not in the material substance. It’s in the name.”

— R.F. Kuang

445. “It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam.”

— R.F. Kuang

446. “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

447. “Still. this transformation felt like betrayal. It felt like the city had clossed off any possible path home.”

— R.F. Kuang

448. “Is it really as bad as all that?’ Robin asked Abel. ‘The factories, I mean.’ ‘Worse,’ said Abel. ‘Those are just the freak accidents they’re reporting on. But they don’t say what it’s like to work day after day on those cramped floors. Rising before dawn and working until nine with few breaks in between. And those are the conditions we covet. The jobs we wish we could get back. I imagine they don’t make you work half as hard at university, do they?”

— R.F. Kuang

449. “I want my authors to believe fully in the worlds they create, and I want their belief to generate my belief in turn.”

— R.F. Kuang

450. “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