Anvi > Anvi's Quotes

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I was wrong,” he says, making a crude heart shape with his hands. “Sun and rain make a rainbow.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Believe Me

“To the world, she is formidable.
To me? She is the world.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Believe Me

“¨Happiness will stop feeling strange if we see it every day¨”
― Tahereh Mafi, Believe Me

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert

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

“I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“You humans always think you’re destined for things, for tragedy or for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Power dictates acceptability,”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Fear was impossible to eradicate. But so was the will to survive.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn't fit your present understanding of the world.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“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, The Drowning Faith

“He loves her.
Of this he's certain.
He loves her laugh; that sharp, sudden sound; the cynical laugh that always comes too quick, like it's ripped out of her. He loves her quick, confident grin. He loves her resilience, her bravery, even her impulsiveness.
She's everything he's not: unbound, reckless, free. He's never known anyone like her.
She terrifies him, and he loves her so much it hurts.
In all of his worst nightmares, she's dying. She's fading away in his arms, helpless and whimpering, while hot, dark blood spills over his fingers.
This he tells her.
He doesn't tell her that his hand holds the blade.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Who is the true god.”
“Chaos,” he says.
That’s the closest the Hesperians will ever come to understanding the Pantheon. They’ll never grasp the depths of it; the terrifying swirl of forces that constitute all that is. Their minds can’t handle its incoherence; the fact that the sixty-four gods do not will and do not care. They can’t fathom a world without intention. The only word they might accept is chaos.
But Nezha knows divinity. It’s fathomless. It is not something that can be measured or studied; can’t be described through meticulously constructed logic. The forces that dreamed up this world are the opposite of rational. Divinity isn’t knowable. It’s the Dragon in the grotto. It’s the Dragon inside him. It’s the three madmen who united a nation and tore themselves apart. It’s pain, eternity, and terror. It’s endless, all-consuming fire.
It’s her.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“He knew exactly what choice she'd made and what she intended. And that made everything- hating her, loving her, surviving her, so much harder.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

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

“Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“How wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Her memory did that sometimes; she confused memories and reality, her imagination was too vivid, she couldn’t help it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“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, Babel

“Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“So, you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as the rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty - rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the authors ideology and biases.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“We're here to make magic with words”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel