Katabasis Quotes

“She gazed at Peter and thought, 'I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Her memory did that sometimes; she confused memories and reality, her imagination was too vivid, she couldn’t help it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn't know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Alice found it a bit difficult to breathe just then. Her cheeks burned, and her head felt uncomfortably light. She’d hoped, as an undergraduate, that this intense physiological reaction to jealousy might eventually go away, but as she progressed through graduate school it only grew worse. Every published paper, every conference invitation, elicited a panicked, fight-or-flight response, one that she’d never gotten good at concealing.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“How wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“You’ve got that look about you.” “What look?” “Well, not to be rude, but you’re all fucked up, aren’t you?”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Birth rate’s gone down, they said.” “Has it?” “Postwar boom’s over, everywhere’s developed, and all the girls are taking pills—” “Oh, is that it?” “My word.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“And so perhaps it was entirely possible - common, even - for you to look into the eyes of someone you'd been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own - and fail to recognize them at all.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“She was not alone. She was safe. There was at least a single other soul in this universe who vibrated at her same frequency.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Surely no one else lived like this - burdened by the tiniest details they assumed had enormous consequences. Surely no one else was so anchored by anxiety. Other people could stumble and shake their heads and move on. How she envied their lightness.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“All the stories were wrong - no siren's call was as alluring as the sea itself, and the quiet dark beyond the shore.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Being an idiot!” All four Shades shuddered; a quivering mass of jelly. “Oh, the horror! Oh, to not be clever!” And one of them wailed, “What if you never learn to read!”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“academia respected discipline, rewarded effort, but even more, it adored genius that didn’t have to try.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Believe the lie - trust the lie - it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“And if falling in love was discovery, was letting yourself be discovered the equivalent to being loved?”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Read Russell, for Christ’s sake.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“He could be imperceivable divinity, which in these circles is code for “no one’s published on this.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Oh, he took a job in industry,” they would say, as if “industry” here was a euphemism like a farm for old sick dogs. And they said it with a kind, patronizing lilt that betrayed what they truly meant: alt academia meant failure. The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“You couldn’t keep it up, counting down the seconds from one day to another.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis