Kadie > Kadie's Quotes

“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

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“We have to die to get their pity. We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. I don't want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko. I don't want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Mande mwen yon ti kou ankò ma di ou,’ she’d told Anthony once, when he’d first asked her what she thought of Hermes, if she thought they might succeed. He’d tried his best to parse Kreyòl with what he knew of French, then he’d given up. ‘What’s that mean?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘At least, we say it when we don’t know the answer, or don’t care to share the answer.’ ‘And what’s it literally mean?’ She’d winked at him. ‘Ask me a little later, and I’ll tell you.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The university ripped us from our homes and made us believe our futures could only consist of serving the Crown,' said Robin.
'The university tells us we are special, chosen, selected, when really we are severed from our motherlands and raised within spitting distance of a class we can never truly become a part of. The university turned us against our own and made us believe our only options were complicity or the streets. That was no favour, Sterling. It was cruelty. Don't ask me to love my master.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The bars were singing, shaking; 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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“But that's the great contradiction of colonialism. It's built to destroy that which it prizes most.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“There are so many battles to be fought, so many fights on so many fronts – in India, in China, in the Americas – all linked together by the same drive to exploit that which is not white and English.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“By the time they’d finished their tea, they were almost in love with each other – not quite yet, because true love took time and memories, but as close to love as first impressions could take them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“He entertained himself with ideas of heaven as paradise, of green hills and brilliant skies where he and Ramy could sit and talk and watch an eternal sunset. But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“So you have no faith in the gods?’ Jiang asked. ‘I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,’ she replied. ‘I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.’ She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating. Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be. But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response. He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: ‘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?’ ‘But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?’ Jiang countered. ‘Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?’ ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Rin. ‘Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.’ Rin thought it was somewhat unreasonable to ask her to puzzle out what philosophers and theologians had been trying to answer for millennia, but she returned to the library. And came back with more questions still. ‘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.’ ‘Why should I’ ‘Because I know you want power.’ He tapped her forehead again. ‘But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Contained within my mind?' Rin repeated carefully. Jiang glanced sideways at her. 'Do you know what the word entheogen means?' She shook her head. 'It means the generation of the god within,' he said. He reached out and tapped her forehead in that same place. 'The merging of god and person.' 'But we aren't gods,' she said. She had spent the past week in the library trying to trace Nikara theology to its roots. Nikara religious mythology was full of encounters between the mortal and divine, but nowhere in her research had anyone mentioned anything about god-creation. 'Shamans communicate with gods. They don't create gods.' 'What's the difference between a god within and a god outside? What is the difference between the universe contained in your mind and the universe external?' Jiang tapped both of her temples. 'Wasn't that the basis of your criticism of Hesperia's theological hierarchy? That the idea of a divine creator separate from us and ruling over us made no sense?' 'Yes, but...' She trailed off, trying to make sense of what she wanted to say. 'I didn't mean that we are gods, I meant that...' She wasn't sure what she meant. She looked at Jiang in supplication. For once, he gave her the easy answer. 'You must conflate these concepts. The god outside you. The god within. Once you understand that these concepts are one and the same, once you can hold both concepts in your head and know them to be true, you'll be a shaman.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Once an empire has become convinced of its worldview, anything that evidences the contrary must be erased.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“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

“Rin locked herself inside her cabin to wage a mental battle with a god.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“But Nezha won't lie. "Who is the true god?" "Chaos," he says.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“Let's answer this question once and for all. Let's pit their god against mine. Let's see which one is real.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“This world isn't permanent. It does not objectively exist, whatever that means. The great sage Zhuangzi once said that he didn't know whether he dreamed of transforming into a butterfly at night, or whether he was always living in a butterfly's dream. This world is a butterfly's dream. This world is the gods' dream. And when we dream of the gods, that just means we've woken up. Does that make sense?”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

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

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

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God