Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I’m not someone for you to use.”

— R.F. Kuang

402. “The world was simpler when all that existed was what you could perceive in front of you. Easier to forget the underlying forces that constructed the dream. Easier to believe that reality existed only on one plane.”

— R.F. Kuang

403. “They’ll make you an outsider, because you’re not like them. That’s okay. Don’t let any of that discourage you. No matter what they say, you deserve to be here.”

— R.F. Kuang

404. “She stared up at the ceiling, trying to will her racing heartbeat to slow down. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong – a deep seated discomfort that wasn’t just the absence of rolling waves.”

— R.F. Kuang

405. “She woke up chanting classical analects, which terrified Kesegi, who thought she had been possessed by ghosts. And in a way, she had been – she dreamed of ancient poems by long dead voices and woke up shaking from nightmares where she’d got them wrong.”

— R.F. Kuang

406. “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

407. “All prayer is simply repetition – a imposition of your demands upon the gods. The difference between shamans and everyone else is that our prayers actually work.”

— R.F. Kuang

408. “She burned away the part of her that would have felt remorse for those deaths, because if she felt them, if she felt each and every single one of them, it would have torn her apart.”

— R.F. Kuang

409. “The Nikara practiced these rituals regardless, went through the motions because there was comfort in doing so, because it was a way for them to express their anxieties about the ebbs and flows of their fortunes.”

— R.F. Kuang

410. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

412. “And they don’t get that film is a totally different medium, and requires different storytelling skills,” says Justin. “It’s a translation, really. And translation across mediums is inherently unfaithful to some extent. Roland Barthes. An act of translation is an act of betrayal.”

— R.F. Kuang

413. “I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses.”

— R.F. Kuang

414. “Well – since in the Bible, God split mankind apart. And I wonder if – if the purpose of translation, then, is to bring mankind back together. If we translate to – I don’t know, bring about that paradise again, on earth, between nations.’ Professor Playfair looked baffled by this. But quickly his features reassembled into a sprightly beam. ‘Well, of course. Such is the project of empire – and why, therefore, we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.”

— R.F. Kuang

415. “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

416. “If they couldn’t capture the Autumn Palace, at least they had a good chance of blowing it up.”

— R.F. Kuang

417. “New words in English were a game to him, for in understanding the word he always came to understand something about English history or culture itself. He delighted when common words were, unexpectedly, formed from other words he knew. Hussy was a compound of house and wife. Holiday was a compound of holy and day. Bedlam came, implausibly, from Bethlehem. Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you.”

— R.F. Kuang

418. “The Seer took his hand. Brought it to his lips and kissed it.”

— R.F. Kuang

419. “Then their fingers met, and she had a body again, and she could feel, feel his hands cup her cheeks and his forehead press against hers. She felt it acutely when he grasped her shoulders and shook her, hard. “Wake up,” he said. “You’re going to drown.”

— R.F. Kuang

420. “You know what I mean,’ she huffed. ‘She’s not Haitian. She’s French. And I just don’t see why she has to be so difficult.”

— R.F. Kuang

421. “There are so many battles to be fought, so many fights on so many fronts – in India, in China, in the Americas – all linked together by the same drive to exploit that which is not white and English.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

423. “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

424. “I killed Cock Robin. Who saw him die?”

— R.F. Kuang

425. “He reached into his memory to recall how Chinese conversations felt, how Mandarin sounded when it rolled naturally off his tongue, when he didn’t have to pause to remember the tones of the next word he uttered. But he was forgetting. That terrified him. Sometimes, during practice conversations, he found himself blanking on a word he used to toss around constantly. And sometimes he sounded, to his own ears, like a European sailor imitating Chinese without knowing what he said.”

— R.F. Kuang

426. “On the topic of cultural exposition, she’s written that she doesn’t “see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text.”

— R.F. Kuang

427. “London is a blathering mess. It’s impossible to get anything done here; the city’s too loud, and it demands too much of you. You can escape out to places like Hampstead, but the screaming core draws you back in whether you like it or not.”

— R.F. Kuang

428. “Robin shut his eyes and imagined his mother’s face. She smiles. She says his name.”

— R.F. Kuang

429. “War was a nightmare.”

— R.F. Kuang

430. “It’s as if – you know how when you’re ill for a long time, you forget how it feels to be healthy? You get used to your head ringing, your ears being blocked, or your nose being stuffed – and you don’t even notice you’re not right anymore. Until you are.”

— R.F. Kuang

431. “I don’t want to be saved!” Rin shrieked. “I want power! I want Altan’s power! I want to be the most powerful shaman there ever was, so that there is no one I can’t save!”

— R.F. Kuang

432. “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

433. “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:8–9, Revised Standard Version.”

— R.F. Kuang

434. “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

435. “It was like tunnelling into the crevasses of his own mind, peeling things apart to see how they worked, and it both intrigued and unsettled him.”

— R.F. Kuang

436. “Don’t take that tone with me.”

— R.F. Kuang

437. “Is the tower – ’ ‘Larger on the inside than it seems on the outside?’ Anthony asked. ‘Indeed.’ Robin had not noticed this at first, but now felt disoriented by the contradiction. Babel’s exterior was massive, but it still did not appear tall enough to admit the high ceilings and towering shelves of each interior floor. ‘It’s a pretty trick of silver-working, though I’m not sure of the match-pair involved. It’s been like this since I got here; we take it for granted.”

— R.F. Kuang

438. “He’s a weird one,” Baji said cheerfully, turning back to Rin. “He’s an initiate of a minor river god. Far more committed to his religion than the rest of us.” “Which god do you summon?” “The god of pigs.”

— R.F. Kuang

439. “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

440. “What’s the worst that could happen?” “You’re so young,” he said softly. “You have no idea.”

— R.F. Kuang

441. “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

442. “The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. 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.”

— R.F. Kuang

443. “Your patriotism is a farce. You dress up your crusade with moral arguments, when in truth you would let millions die if it means you get your so-called justice.”

— R.F. Kuang

444. “Martial arts is no more complicated than pure physics. If that confuses you, then simply take the advice of the grand masters. Don’t ask questions. Just obey.”

— R.F. Kuang

445. “But she didn’t want to be strong. Because if she were strong then she would be sober, and if she were sober she would have to consider the consequences of her actions. Then she’d have to look into the chasm.”

— R.F. Kuang

446. “You have an ability that can begin or end wars. You could launch this Empire into a glorious new and united age, and you could also destroy us. What you don’t get to do is remain neutral. When you have the power that you do, your life is not your own.”

— R.F. Kuang

447. “The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.”

— R.F. Kuang

448. “He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth.”

— R.F. Kuang

449. “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

450. “Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day.”

— R.F. Kuang