R F Kuang > Quotes

“But he had to try, really try, to make sure that he did not stop dreaming in his native tongue.”
― R F Kuang, Babel

“If I die, I die,” said Alice. “But there’s no life otherwise, I think. Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all. That’s just it. It’s just an impulse. And we’ve both determined that’s not enough. You know that.”
― R F Kuang

“We've got a problem of power asymmetry now," she said. "Which means we only win if this war occurs in three phases. The first is a strategic retreat. That's what is happening now, intentionally or not. Second is the long stalemate. Then, at last, the counteroffensive.”
― R F Kuang

“Power dictates acceptability”
― R F Kuang

“Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.”
― R F Kuang

“The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an 'affliction', as meant by the Old Icelandic angr; and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor , which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.”
― R F Kuang

“He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive.”
― R F Kuang

“She didn’t know how to stop. She didn’t know how to want anything else. She didn’t know how to be anything other than a soldier, and if there was nothing left to fight, then something was wrong with the world.”
― R F Kuang

“You have to believe there's an after," she murmured. "They did."
"They were better than us."
"They were." She curled around his arm. "But it all still wound up in our hands, didn't it?”
― R F Kuang, Babel

“In truth though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.”
― R F Kuang

“She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in. The only creature in this vast, cruel land who could kill him. And sometimes, in his loveliest dreams, he imagines she does.”
― R F Kuang

“A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers.”
― R F Kuang

“It was the kind of evening when the world seemed drained of colour, a painting in progress, a sketch really, existing in greys and shadows only.”
― R F Kuang

“Uttered in that drawing room, the most quintessentially English of space, it didn't feel like it belonged. It felt made-up. And it scared him, sometimes, how often his memory would lapse, how the syllables he'd grown up around could suddenly sound so unfamiliar.”
― R F Kuang

“A weak body was just the same thing as a weak mind; either might afflict you, and both disqualified you from genius." -- Katabasis”
― R F Kuang

“this was the worst thing that Professor Grimes had ever done to her - made her doubt she was a good scholar. He's destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her own thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research and carry out an entire project on her own.”
― R F Kuang

“Yet, didn’t he have a right to be happy? He had never felt such warmth in his chest until now, had never looked forward to getting up in the morning as he did now. He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance-and was it so wrong for him to cling what he had?”
― R F Kuang

“Then I will die on my feet," she said. "I will die with flames in my hand and fury in my heart.”
― R F Kuang

“My therapist taught me once that the best way to deal with panic-inducing flashbacks is to think of them as scenes from a horror movie. Jump scares are terrifying the first time you see them because they catch you off guard, and because you don't know what to expect. But once you watch them again and again, once you know exactly when the demon-possessed nun jumps out from behind the corner, they lose their power over you.”
― R F Kuang

“He would never know, for instance, that there was a time when Griffin, Sterling, Anthony, and Evie had thought of themselves as a cohort as eternally bonded as Robin's did.”
― R F Kuang, Babel

“There is always another way to spin the story, another wrench to throw into the narrative. I have learned this now if nothing else.”
― R F Kuang