Amala's > Amala's's Quotes

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived… it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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 endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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

“Publishing picks a winner—someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough—and lavishes all its money and resources on them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“The original draft made you feel dumb, alienated at times, and frustrated with the self-righteousness of it all. It stank of all the most annoying things about Athena. The new version is a universally relatable story, a story that anyone can see themselves in.”
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

“You’ll sense the individual grains of rice coated in butter, and an aromatic fragrance as if the rice were being fried will ascend to your nose. A rich, milky sweetness will spread itself across your tongue . . .”
― Asako Yuzuki, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder

“He’s been operating out of the coast and he doesn’t like fish?” “He’s picky.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“Book hoarders,” Moore explained. “Why would you hoard books in a library?” “To prove that you’ve found them,” said Moore. “To prove you know of them. To prove you have proximity to them. But reading them, that’s too much.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis