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R.F. Kuang Quotes

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“You want to do the right thing," said Ramy, bullish. "You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you've committed, then you're absolved." "I do not-" "That's why you took the fall for us that night. Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You're obsessed with punishment. But that's not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world's still broken. A war's still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don't want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.”

SacrificeMartyrdomSelf Punishment
Book:Babel
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“Anyhow, tired to the point of collapse was a default state. The expectation was simply that, through some combination of strong coffee and Lembas Bread, one pushed through until all deadlines were met and one could collapse into an indefinite coma without consequence. Alice had spent most of graduate school in this state, and it was not so bad.”

HumorPerseveranceRealismExhaustionAcademiaGraduate StudentsCoping MechanismsDeadlinesStudent LifeWork And Stress
Book:Katabasis
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“He didn't mention the family to Mrs. Piper or Professor Lovell. He didn't want to dwell on the things they represented - the fact that for all of his professed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and to helping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all. He'd seen hard times in Canton, but he had never not known where his next meal might come from or where he would sleep at night. He had never looked at his family and wondered what it might take to keep them alive. For all his identification with the poor orphan Oliver Twist, for all his bitter self-pity, the fact remained that since the day he had set foot in England, he had not once gone to sleep hungry.”

PoorRevolutionExperienceGuiltHungerAllegianceAssuage
Book:Babel
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“At last Griffin shook his head and said, '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.' His fingers landed on Robin's shoulder, squeezed so hard they hurt. 'But realize this, brother. You fly no one's flag. You're free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.”

HopeFreedom QuotesAlligence
Book:Babel
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“The word 'strike', in relation to labour, originally had the connotation of submission. Ships would drop, or strike, their sails when surrendering to enemy forces or saluting their superiors. But when sailors in 1768 struck their sails in protest to demand better wages, they turned 'strike' from an act of submission to a strategic act of violence; by withholding their labour, they proved they were in fact indispensable.”

PowerLaborMeaningIndispensableSubmissionStrike
Book:Babel
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“I think it's very dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn't write." I open strong, and this gets some approving murmurs from the crowd. But I still see some skeptical faces, especially from the other Asians present, so I continue. "I'd hate to live in a world where we tell people what they should and shouldn't write based on the color of their skin. I mean, turn what you're saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? You can critique a work on the grounds of literary quality, and its representations of history—sure. But I see no reason why I shouldn't tackle this subject if I'm willing to do the work. And as you can tell by the text, I did do the work. You can look up my bibliographies. You can do the fact- checking yourself. Meanwhile, I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else's shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller. And as for the question of profit—I mean, should every writer who writes about dark things feel guilty about it? Should creatives not be paid for their work?”

WritingRacismPoc
Book:Yellowface
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“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.”

HistoryThe Poppy WarThe Burning GodRebecca Kuang
Book:The Burning God
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“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.”

ReligionChaosGodsPantheon
Book:The Drowning Faith
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“The night sky shouldn't be so dark, If the Universe is endless, then starlight should fill all the empty spaces. Light doesn't stop until it hits a surface - so why the dark spaces? From where we stand on Earth, all we should see is light." "Maybe the universe isn't limitless, then," Alice had said. "Or the universe is expanding, And the stars are too young, and all that distant light is still stretching to reach us. And until it does the night lies dark.”

AstrologyLight And DarknessUniverse Gigantic PowerSetting FreeDeep Metaphorical Meaning
Book:Katabasis
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“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. To stop writing would kill me. I'd never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own. And I'd spend the rest of life curdling with jealousy every time someone like Emmy Cho gets a book deal, every time I learn that some young up-and-comer is living the life I should be living. Writing has formed the core of my identity since I was a child. After Dad died, after Mom withdrew into herself, and after Rory decided to forge a life without me, writing gave me a reason to stay alive. And as miserable as it makes me, I'll cling to that magic for as long as I live.”

Writing
Book:Yellowface
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