Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.”

— R.F. Kuang

402. “Her formidable mind retained information like a steel trap. She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges.”

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

404. “Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them.”

— R.F. Kuang

405. “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

406. “The publisher might then hire a Black sensitivity reader to check whether the textual representations are consciously, or unconsciously, racist. They’ve gotten more and more popular in the past few years, as more and more white authors have been criticized for employing racist tropes and stereotypes.”

— R.F. Kuang

407. “At last he realized he was going about it all wrong. This was not Chinese. Griffin had merely used Chinese characters to convey words in a language Robin suspected was English.”

— R.F. Kuang

408. “So far, her novels had presented linear narratives, all told in the past tense from the third person perspective of the singular protagonist. But here, Athena does something similar to what Christopher Nolan does in the movie Dunkirk. Instead of following one particular story, she layers disparate narratives and perspectives together to form a moving mosaic, a crowd crying out in unison.”

— R.F. Kuang

409. “You never want to hurt them. But you have to. You have to put them through hell, because that’s the only way anyone else will survive.”

— R.F. Kuang

410. “She squeezed her wrist, fingers closing over pale burn scars, and inhaled. Focus. In the corner, a water clock rang softly. “Begin,” said the examiner. A hundred test booklets were opened with a flapping noise, like a flock of sparrows taking off at once.”

— R.F. Kuang

411. “You walk up the aisle in a dress that doesn’t fit you. You’re trembling. He’s waiting at the other end. He looks at you like you’re a juicy, fattened pig, a marbled slab of meat for his purchase. He spreads saliva over his dry lips. He doesn’t look away from you throughout the entire banquet. When it’s over, he carries you to his bedroom. He pushes you onto the sheets. She shuddered. Squeezed her eyes shut. Reopened them and found her place on the page.”

— R.F. Kuang

412. “You just have to make it through the next five seconds. Then the next five. Then on and on.”

— R.F. Kuang

413. “I can keep up with your students if you just let me try. I don’t even have to attend recitation. I just need books.”

— R.F. Kuang

414. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

416. “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

417. “She could think of no questions that were not inane. ‘Are you alright?’ Of course Venka was not alright. ‘How did you survive?’ By having the body of a woman. ‘What happened to you?’ But she already knew.”

— R.F. Kuang

418. “Now he was astonished by how much he missed them. The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.”

— R.F. Kuang

419. “I know the vision you dreamed of for this nation and I know I may have destroyed it. But my first obligation is not to the unborn people of this country’s future, but the people who are suffering now, who pass their days in fear because of the war that you have brought to their doorstep.”

— R.F. Kuang

420. “Kitay could afford to be victimized by the city because he had room to fail.”

— R.F. Kuang

421. “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

422. “Sir, I just want to learn to be a good soldier,” she said. Jiang’s face fell. “You and the rest of this school,” he said.”

— R.F. Kuang

423. “Victoire lifted her hand. ‘Is the tower – ’ ‘Larger on the inside than it seems on the outside?’ Anthony asked. ‘Indeed.’ Robin.”

— R.F. Kuang

424. “He put the volume down, struck with the unsettling realization that Professor Lovell – a foreigner – knew more about his mother tongue than he did.”

— R.F. Kuang

425. “Hello, little one, said the Phoenix.”

— R.F. Kuang

426. “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. He stepped toward the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp, their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright.”

— R.F. Kuang

427. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

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

— R.F. Kuang

438. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “No one’s hugged me in so long.”

— R.F. Kuang

445. “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

446. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

448. “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

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

— R.F. Kuang

450. “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