Ashiley > Ashiley's Quotes

“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

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

“Be selfish," he whispered. "Be brave.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“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

“... the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo.”
― 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

“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

“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

“…there is no such thing as humane colonization.”
― 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

“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

“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

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Go," She says. "He waits for you.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright were they dull.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I have no need to forgive you. You cannot offend me.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles