Top 80 Xiran Jay Zhao Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Yet I love the power it’s given me, a power that lies in being underestimated, in wearing assumptions as a disguise.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

2. “You’re my polar star. I’ll go wherever you guide me.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

3. “There’s not a stratum of the world that doesn’t need girls. Maybe we’re devalued precisely because we’re so valuable. The world is too afraid of not bein able to obtain and control us to respect our true worth.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

4. “You know, there’s a kind of predator that disguises itself as prey. That’s the most dangerous kind to people like.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

5. “You can’t shoot me; I’m rich!”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

6. “True love comes from synergy and trust, not merely chemistry.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

7. “He should be the Iron King, and I should be the Iron Queen. Yet Iron Demon and Iron Widow is all they’ll let us be.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

8. “Wow, the horror! As if I wasn’t naked when I was born.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

9. “The world does not deserve my respect. It is not worthy of my kindness or compassion.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

10. “Love isn’t some scarce resource to battle over. Love can be infinite, as much as your heart can open.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

11. “My murder boy, my sweet boy.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

12. “This is not true power. True power is when I stood on the Nine-Tailed Fox with Yang Guang’s corpse at my feet, playing by my own rules. Victorious by my own standards. Reliant on no one but myself.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

13. “Shame and humiliation are self-imposed emotions, and from here on out, I choose not to feel them.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

14. “The voices that refused to be silenced, the hands that refused to be bound, the spirits that refused to be broken.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

15. “Listen up: just because you have the capacity to do something for someone, it doesn’t mean you have the obligation to especially when they won’t even appreciate you for doing it.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

16. “I hate the way I’ve contorted myself into what people think a girl should be, ready to please, ready to serve. Yet I love the power it’s given me, a power that lies in being underestimated, in wearing assumptions as a disguise.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

17. “You can’t shoot me; I’m rich!” Yizhi slips through the opening created.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

18. “You can’t shoot me; I’m from Central Command!” Sima Yi shouts, ramming through the soldier standoff. “You can’t shoot me; I’m rich!” Yizhi slips through the opening created.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

19. “Besides, don’t you know basic geometry, Strategist Sima?” I make a triangle with my fingers and look through it. “A triangle is the strongest shape.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

20. “Yizhi gapes at me. Then a disbelieving laugh rolls out of him. “All right, let me make this clear: Wu Zetian, you inspire me. Whenever i lose hope that the world can change, I remember you. I remember how you fight for what you want, no matter what anyone says, no matter what stands in your way.” He draws me into his arms and murmurs into my hair. “You’re my polar star, I’ll go wherever you guide me.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

21. “Maybe, if things were different, I could get used to this. Being cradled in his warmth and light. Being cherished. Being loved. But I have no faith in love. Love cannot save me. I choose vengeance.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

22. “Men wants us so badly for our bodies, yet hate us so much for our minds.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

23. “We stare at each other, the Iron Demon and the Iron Widow, our arms cuffed, a crown of gun barrels around our heads, trapped among soldiers and fog and battle sounds.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

24. “There will be no redemption. It is not me who is wrong. It’s everyone else.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

25. “This body of mine is not big enough to contain the scale of emotion coursing through me. How could I feel a rage like this, and not be able to tear the sky open and scorch the earth?”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

26. “Perks of refusing to play by the rules: you don’t have to choose between the boy who’d torture a man to death with you and the boy who welcomes you back with pastries.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

27. “Never appease. No one’s ever been respected for appeasing. The only thing you did was let them know there are no consequences to treating you like trash.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

28. “Everyone lives in a different world. So much of the time, people make decisions they don’t want to.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

29. “Infinite possibilities open to me at once. That’s right, I’m no longer human. I’ve been set free from my broken body, that husk of flesh and bone that has been prepared all its existence to be used for the whims and pleasures of men.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

30. “Female. That label has never done anything for me except dictate what I can or cannot do. No going anywhere without permission. No showing too much skin. No speaking too loudly or unkindly, or at all, if the men are talking. No living my life without being constantly aware of how pleasing I am to the eye. No future except pushing out son after son for a husband.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

31. “He will not kill me. He does not get to make me a statistic.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

32. “You cannot appease someone into loving or respecting you.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

33. “Media traffic doesn’t care about right or wrong. Every click on a scandalous headline brings profit; every view of a condemning picture generates revenue. If you’re a big enough cash cow, the media companies will lobby and bribe every government connection they have to keep from losing you.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

34. “Attention, all Gao Enterprise personnel!” Yizhi shouts into his wristlet between ragged breaths. “New bargain: defy us, and all of you and your families will die! Obey us, and you’ll keep everything you have and more!”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

35. “People love to ogle pretty girls, but they love to hate them even more. There’s no one the masses are more obsessed with railing at than the women who dare to stray from the docile ideal of wives and mothers.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

36. “We spend so much effort living these lives, yet every trace of their substance and meaning can be erased so quickly. So easily.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

37. “When you cherish someone for how amazing they are, you don’t pluck them from their roots just to watch them wither in your hands.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

38. “I don’t pity you, you dork,” I say with a small laugh. “I cherish you.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

39. “I’ve been told endless lies since I was born. That I was not kind enough, considerate enough, humble enough, honorable enough, pretty enough, pleasing enough. And that if I failed to meet the needs of those around me, I did not deserve to live.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

40. “Yes. I know.” Shimin’s expression goes cold and stony. “You don’t need to have this pity party for me. Go... go be happy!”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

41. “But a mother who has failed me so thoroughly is no mother of mine.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

42. “Since the day I was born, the world had told me I must accept whatever woth men assign me. And maybe, despite my nonstop rebellion, I did. They told me to choose between accepting their doctrine or dying, and I did. I chose death. It was the surrender that made me fearless.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

43. “Even though everything feels impossible, even though I will never be the same, even though all I want to do is lie down and give up, I make myself keep going.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

44. “You’d better not be tangled up in a love triangle.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

45. “But there is money to be made in being hated this much, and being a source of money means power and protection. Media traffic doesn’t care about right or wrong. Every click on a scandalous headline brings profit; every view of a condemning picture generates revenue.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

46. “Just holds me, bobbing in midair, in the unthinkable distance between heaven and earth that humans are not supposed to reach.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

47. “Despite the endless horrors that we’ve both been through, I really am grateful that we survived to meet each other.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

48. “This is my admittedly graceless strategy: annihilate every center of power, so everything will collapse into chaos and people will have no choice but to obey the new most powerful thing – me.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

49. “With a head full of fantasies of how I’ll flay him alive after he outlives his use, I unzip my pilot coat.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao

50. “We can’t afford to simply go along with the flow of life, because nothing in this world has been created, built, or set up in our favor. If we want something, we have to push back against everything around us and take it by force.”

— Xiran Jay Zhao