Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese.”

— R.F. Kuang

402. “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

403. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “She herself found the dialect nearly indecipherable; every word, it seemed, had to be shortened, with a curt r noise added to the end.”

— R.F. Kuang

410. “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

411. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”

— R.F. Kuang

412. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

414. “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

415. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

417. “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

418. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

420. “Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.”

— R.F. Kuang

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “Normally he would have delighted in finding out. But he was busy sulking, still both baffled and resentful at how he’d lost his friends in the process of trying to save them.”

— R.F. Kuang

426. “To be fair, their fights were tabled rather than resolved. They had not really confronted the reasons why they’d fallen out, but they were all willing to blame it on stress. There would be a time when they had to face up to their very real differences, when they would hash things out instead of always changing the subject, but for now they were content to enjoy the summer and to remember again what it was like to love one another.”

— R.F. Kuang

427. “The Hermes Society took silver only in amounts small enough to mask with some accounting trickery, for the virtue of a humanities faculty, Griffin explained, was that everyone was hopeless with numbers.”

— R.F. Kuang

428. “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

429. “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

430. “They would take back the south with sheer numbers. The Mugenese and the Republic were strong, but the south was many. And if southerners were dirt like all the legends said, then they would crush their enemies with the overwhelming force of the earth until they could only dream of breathing. They would bury them with their bodies. They would drown them in their blood.”

— R.F. Kuang

431. “None of that mattered anymore. They weren’t stupid little girls anymore. They weren’t students anymore. War had transformed them both into wholly unimaginable creatures, and their relationship had transformed with them.”

— R.F. Kuang

432. “But we are the weaker party. We have no choice but to play their game. That’s how power works.”

— R.F. Kuang

433. “The fire doesn’t give, the fire takes, and takes, and takes.”

— R.F. Kuang

434. “She felt like a little rodent burrowing down in its hole, trying to pretend that if it lay low enough, the the world outside wouldn’t bother it.”

— R.F. Kuang

435. “We screamed back and forth a little more, relishing the other’s presence at the other end of the line, for it was so nice to know someone who understood this exact dream, who knew how mere words can become sentences can become a completed masterpiece, how that masterpiece can rocket you into a wholly unrecognizable world where you have everything – a world you wrote for yourself.”

— R.F. Kuang

436. “The price of power is pain.”

— R.F. Kuang

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction.”

— R.F. Kuang

441. “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

442. “You can’t kill a movement.”

— R.F. Kuang

443. “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

444. “Tutor Feyrik’s eyes followed her eagerly as she slipped a hand into the satchel and drew out one heavy, sweet-smelling packet. Then another. And then another. “This is six tael worth of premium opium,” she said calmly. Six tael was half of what Tutor Feyrik might earn in an entire year. “You stole this from the Fangs,” he said uneasily. She shrugged. “Smuggling’s a difficult business. The Fangs know the risk. Packages go missing all the time. They can hardly report it to the magistrate.”

— R.F. Kuang

445. “Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.”

— R.F. Kuang

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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