Rf Kuang Quotes

War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains.

Fire and water looked so lovely together. It was a pity they destroyed each other by nature.

I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.

Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.

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.

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.

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.

They were monsters!" Rin shrieked. "They were not human!" "Have you ever considered" he said slowly "that that was exactly what they thought of us?

Take what you want. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you.

This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.

Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.

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.

We aren’t here to be sophisticated. We’re here to fuck people up.

I don't love you. And I can kill anything.

Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.

You can’t do this for me,” he said. “I won’t let you.” “It’s not for you. It’s not a favor. It’s the cruelest thing I could do.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

Great danger is always associated with great power. The difference between the great and the mediocre is that the great are willing to take the risk.

She was a goddess. She was a monster. She‘d nearly destroyed this country. And then she‘d given it one last, gasping chance to live.

Be selfish," he whispered. "Be brave.

Between us, we have the fire and the water. I'm quite sure that together, we can take on the wind.

People will seek to use you or destroy you. If you want to live, you must pick a side. So do not shirk from war, child. Do not flinch from suffering. When you hear screaming, run toward it.

She liked listening to Nezha talk. He was so hopeful, so optimistic, and so stupid.

Well, fuck the heavenly order of things. If getting married to a gross old man was her preordained role on this earth, then Rin was determined to rewrite it.

She terrifies him, and he loves her so much it hurts.

How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’ ‘Not as odd as you’d think,’ said Victoire. ‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.

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

Rin was so tired of having to prove her humanity.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic

I am the force of creation, I am the end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. I am a god.

Dying was easy. Living was so much harder—that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her.

There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.

Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

You don't fix hurts by pretending they never happened. You treat them like infected wounds. You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal.

When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.

It’s easy to be brave. Harder to know when not to fight.

If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?

You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It's shackling you. You've identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you. When are you going to realize you can't be one of them?

He brushed his lips against her forehead as he drove the knife deeper into her back.

I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.

But eventually, you'll have to ask yourself precisely what you're fighting for. And you'll have to find a reason to live past vengeance.

But what is the opposite of fidelity?' asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of his dialitic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. 'Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?

He loves her. Of this he’s certain.

It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.

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.

We're here to make magic with words

Reading should be an enjoyable experience, not a chore.

Come back down,” he said, his expression suddenly grim. His fingers clenched tight around hers. “Listen, Rin. I don’t care what else happens up there. But you come back to me.

That's the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.

She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them. Good. It should.

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.

I don't need your pity. I need you to kill them for me. You have to kill them for me," Venka hissed. "Swear it. Swear on your blood that you will burn them.

You asked how large my sorrow is. And I answered, like a river in spring flowing east.

…there is no such thing as humane colonization.

He can’t take his eyes off of her. She’s the most magnificent thing he’s ever seen.

Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them?

What’s the worst that could happen?” “You’re so young,” he said softly. “You have no idea.

Power dictates acceptability,

She remembered the first time she'd ever laid eyes on Nezha, and then all the times thereafter. It hurt to see him. It hurt so much.

If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.

If you're focused only on your enemy's weapon, you'll always be on the defensive. Look past the weapon to your target. Focus on what you want to kill.

Don’t try to speak,” Nezha murmurs, because it’ll kill him if she does. Because his resolve is only so strong, and if she utters another word then he’ll be lost.

A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

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.

History isn't a premade tapestry that we've got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.

Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics

He went back to his first morning in Oxford: climbing a sunny hill with Ramy, picnic basket in hand. Elderflower cordial. Warm brioche, sharp cheese, a chocolate tart for dessert. The air smelled like a promise, all of Oxford shone like an illumination, and he was falling in love.

I mean, if that ship were a person, I would fuck that ship,” said Baji.

If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own.

Words tell stories. Specifically, the history of those words - how they came into use, and how their meaning morphed into what they mean today - tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact.

This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.

She had a weapon now. She wasn't defenseless against him. She'd never been defenseless. She had just never thought to look.

Immigrants, we get the job done. (Acknowlegments)

But the boy already had a god of his own. And the gods were selfish.

Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn't fit your present understanding of the world.

She saw it in a flash of utter clarity. She knew what she had to do. The only path, the only way forward. And what a familiar path it was. It was so obvious now. The world was a dream of the gods, and the gods dreamed in sequences, in symmetry, in patterns. History repeated itself, and she was only the latest iteration of the same scene in a tapestry that had been spun long before her birth.

The anger was a shield. The anger helped her to keep from remembering what she'd done. Because as long as she was angry, then it was okay — she'd acted within reason. She was afraid that if she stopped being angry, she might crack apart.

She knew with certainty that she'd lost Nezha forever.

I‘m exactly what they deserve,” she said. “They don‘t want peace, they want revenge. I‘m it.

No one’s focused on how we’re all connected. We only think about how we suffer, individually. The poor and middle-class of this country don’t realize they have more in common with us than they do with Westminster.

I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.

Nothing is written," said the Phoenix. "You humans always think you're destinied for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose. You chose to take the exam. You chose to come to Sinegard. You chose to pledge Lore, you chose to study the paths of the gods, and you chose to follow your commander's demands over your master's warnings. At every critical juncture you were given an option; you were given a way out. Yet you picked precisely the roads that led you here. You are at this temple, kneeling before me, only because you wanted to be.

Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

What you don’t understand,’ said Ramy, ‘is how much people like you will excuse if it just means they can get tea and coffee on their breakfast tables. They don’t care, Letty. They just don’t care.

If we push in the right spots - then we've moved things to the breaking point. The the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn't a premed tapestry that we've got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.

She recognized the way he was looking at her. It was how she’d once looked at Altan. It was the way she’d seen Daji look at Riga—that look of wretched, desperate, and reproachful loyalty. It said, Do it. Take what you want, it said. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you. Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.

We are foreign because this nation has marked us so, and as long as we’re punished daily for our ties to our homelands, we might as well defend them. No, Letty, we can’t maintain this fantasy. The only one who can do that is you.

You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” She leaned down close until her lips brushed his skin, until her breath scorched the side of his face. “I’m not Sinegardian elite. I’m that savage mud-skinned Speerly bitch that wiped a country off the map. And sometimes when I get a little too angry, I snap.

In the years to come, Robin would return so many times to this night. He was forever astonished by its mysterious alchemy, by how easily two badly socialized, restrictively raised strangers had transformed into kindred spirits in a span of minutes.

All these years trying to find a way to kill himself, and here’s someone who might actually finish the job. And somehow, paradoxically, this is the most he’s ever wanted to be alive. This is the first time in an eternity that he doesn’t feel like he’s drowning

Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.

Jiang was wrong. She was not dabbling in forces she could not control, for the gods were not dangerous. The gods had no power at all, except what she gave them. The gods could affect the universe only through humans like her. Her destiny had not been written in the stars, or in the registers of the Pantheon. She had made her choices fully and autonomously. And though she called upon the gods to aid her in battle, they were her tools from beginning to end. She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of the Cike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding. And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.

But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?" "Because you're part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn't understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.

Sir?” Kitay asked. The magistrate turned to look at him. “What?” With a grunt, Kitay raised the crate over his head and flung it to the ground. It landed on the dirt with a hard thud, not the tremendous crash Rin had rather been hoping for. The wooden lid of the crate popped off. Out rolled several very nice porcelain teapots, glazed with a lovely flower pattern. Despite their tumble, they looked unbroken. Then Kitay took to them with a slab of wood. When he was done smashing them, he pushed his wiry curls out of his face and whirled on the sweating magistrate, who cringed in his seat as if afraid Kitay might start smashing at him, too. “We are at war,” Kitay said. “And you are being evacuated because for gods know what reason, you’ve been deemed important to this country’s survival. So do your job. Reassure your people. Help us maintain order. Do not pack your fucking teapots.

When she turned, she only saw one silhouette against the dark. Nezha had come alone. Unarmed. He always looked different in the moonlight. His skin shone paler, his features looked softer, resembling less the harsh visage of his father and more the lovely fragility of his mother. He looked younger. He looked like the boy she'd known at school

Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.

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’.