R. F. Kuang > Quotes

“An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.”
― R. F. Kuang

“Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair. Everything was always falling apart; nothing in lab went right; you couldn't afford groceries, your cottage had a rat problem, all your instructors hated you, and you were always one step away from flushing all your life's work down the toilet.”
― R. F. Kuang

“You know very well what a heap is. You know it when you see it. It is like porn.”
― R. F. Kuang

“Magick, the most mysterious and capricious of disciplines, admired for its power, derided for its frivolity, is in brief the act of telling lies about the world.”
― R. F. Kuang

“These trade networks were carved in stone. Nothing was pushing this arrangement off its course; there were too many private interests, too much money at stake. They could see where it was going, but the people who had the power to do anything about it had been placed in positions where they would profit, and the people who suffered most had no power at all.”
― R. F. Kuang

“And he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew that they could be up to no good, and that he still wanted to be respected by then enough to be included in their ranks.”
― R. F. Kuang

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― 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

“Because Rin and Kitay were bonded in a way that he could never understand, and there was no world where Rin died and Kitay remained alive.”
― R. F. Kuang

“This was what the balance of power looked like now. People like her waved a hand and millions were crushed within the confines of some elemental disaster, flung off the chessboard of the world like irrelevant pieces. People like her- shamans, all of them- were like children stomping around over entire cities as if they were mud castles, glass houses, fungible entities that could be targeted and demolished.”
― R. F. Kuang

“He’s lying,” said Professor Playfair. “He’s rambling, Margaret, the boy’s gone mad—”

"But madness is incoherent,” Professor Craft said. “And lies are self‑serving.” This story - it benefits no one, certainly not these two,” she said, pointing at Robin and Victoire, “and it is coherent.”
― R. F. Kuang

“Believe the lie, trust the lie. It is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls.”
― R. F. Kuang, Katabasis (Collector's Edition): A Novel

“She couldn't stand those screeching activists who believed the only politically just thing was to become a lesbian. Burning bras, trashing dolls, the constant invocation of the scary word *discrimination* - it was all so embarrassing, it felt less like a revolution than a tantrum. It seemed the best way to prove women were not inferior was just to not be inferior.”
― R. F. Kuang

“No- they couldn't just do this to her. They might think they could sweep her away like rubbish, but she didn't have to lie down and take it. She had come from nothing. She wasn't going back to nothing.”
― R. F. Kuang

“I've killed millions of you before, she thought. This is routine now. This is nothing.”
― R. F. Kuang

“If he tripped, half the shop owners on the street would help him up, hoping for a handsome tip. If his pocket were cut, he'd go home and get another purse. Kitay could afford to be victimized by the city because he had room to fail.”
― R. F. Kuang

“Now she understood Hell in full. She saw its intricate design; could understand that it was no random imitation of living rituals but a cruel mirror; that all its karmic reflection just was to show life's worthlessness to begin with.”
― R. F. Kuang, Katabasis (Collector's Edition): A Novel

“Ramy gave him a long look. ‘The British, Birdie. Keep up.”
― R. F. Kuang

“Violence shows them how much we're willing to give up,' said Griffin. 'Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you're capable of, truly. You can't imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.' Griffin pointed at the middle of the birch. 'Pull the trigger, kid.”
― R. F. Kuang

“Don't ghosts just want to be remembered?”
― R. F. Kuang

“We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves.”
― R. F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“The Warlords like to claim that the Keju makes Nikan a meritocracy, but the system is designed to keep the poor and illiterate in their place. You're offending them with your very presence.”
― 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

“Dying was easy. Living was so much harder—that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her.”
― R. F. Kuang

“War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.”
― R. F. Kuang

“Let them think of us as dirt, Rin thought. She was dirt. Her army was dirt. But dirt was common, ubiquitous, patient, and necessary. The soil gave life to the country. And the earth always reclaimed what it was owed.”
― R. F. Kuang

“She wanted to be alive and mortal and eternally temporary with him, and that was why she cried. [i love that this isn't in any sort of romantic context]”
― R. F. Kuang

“you're lost, brother. You're a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It's gone.”
― R. F. Kuang

“You had to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way, and as long as you could trick yourself, then you could trick the world.”
― R. F. Kuang

“I wanted to say that I had read Zhang Ailing only in English translation, but that even in translation her descriptive power and insight into interpersonal relationships had floored me, and that I found her grayscale author photo in which she wore an elegant cheongsam both alluring and pretentious, that I had spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to be a female author who wanted critical acclaim and also to look pretty.”
― R. F. Kuang, Taipei Story