Charlotte Chan > Charlotte's Quotes

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“He got plucky," Daji said. "I turned him to mincemeat and sent him back to Vaisra in a dumpling basket." Jiang arched an eyebrow. "Darling, fucking what?”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.”
― 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

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“I’ve been lucky to have been cared for and loved since childhood by a circle of women. Now it’s time for me to create a wider circle, so I can do for my daughters and other women in the household what Grandmother, Miss Zhao, Meiling, and even Poppy have done for”
― Lisa See, Lady Tan's Circle of Women

“You must speak if you wish to be heard.” Her features soften, perhaps because she realizes she’s been harsh. “I’m not angry at you,” she says. “I’m irritated with men. I’m lucky to love your grandfather, but most men—other doctors, especially—don’t like to see us succeed. You must always show them respect and let them think they know more than you do, while understanding that you can achieve something they never can. You can actually help women.”
― Lisa See, Lady Tan's Circle of Women

“Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of "Don't Forget!"s and "Remember!"s over us. We don't have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents' meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they're doing. We're the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else's children can swim.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“And I don’t think you need to be scared of forgetting me,” the boy says
“No?”
“No. Because if you forget me then you’ll just get the chance to get to know me again. And you’ll like that, because I’m actually a pretty cool person to get to know.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“Why are you holding my hand so tight, Grandpa?” the boy whispers
again.
“Because all of this is disappearing, Noahnoah. And I want to keep hold
of you longest of all.”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“What do I say to Noah? How do I explain that I’m going to be leaving him even before I die?”
― Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

“Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“Love was there in my empty bed. It was piled up in the records Lauren bought me when we were teenagers. It was in the smudged recipe cards from my mum in between the pages of cookbooks in my kitchen cabinet. Love was in the bottle of gin tied with a ribbon that India had packed me off with; in the smeary photo-strips with curled corners that would end up stuck to my fridge. It was in the note that lay on the pillow next to me, the one I would fold up and keep in the shoebox of all the other notes she had written before. I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love. There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir

“No one would lift a weapon. No one would fight or flee. Just this night, just this moment, they had entered a liminal space where their past and future did not matter, where they could be the children they used to be.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.
"After all this time?"
"Always," said Snape.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Not my daughter, you bitch!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“You'll stay with me?'
Until the very end,' said James.”
― J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Does it hurt?" The childish question had escaped Harry's lips before he could stop it.

"Dying? Not at all," said Sirius. "Quicker and easier than falling asleep.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Hello, Minister!" bellowed Percy, sending a neat jinx straight at Thicknesse, who dropped his wand and clawed at the front of his robes, apparently in awful discomfort. "Did I mention I'm resigning?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“My word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?’ Dumbledore sighed, looking down into Snape’s ferocious, anguished face. ‘If you insist …”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“You know, I sometimes think we Sort too soon...”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel