"The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire's sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial"

Ramy has my whole heart I love him sm🥹🫶

My mother never says sorry. Not verbally. Not explicitly. When we finish yelling at each other, are done causing the house to erupt, she stays seated. She stays firm in what she’s just said no matter how cruel and I walk away angry and crying. She calls me an hour later when the silence is louder than us and tells me to eat. She kisses my cheek and the flesh burns and blisters and she tells me to eat.

“While trying to understand the apparent war raging on inside of you, I didn’t have the time nor the energy to stop you from starting one within me.”

Excerpts from a book I’ll never write.

“Someone had said that the pain of loss comes from knowing you won’t experience someone’s love again. The idea of it is so crushing the pain of it never leaves. Maybe that is why I’m not so distraught mama. Because I’d never known what your love was like to begin with.”

Excerpts of a book I’ll never write.

the younger sibling is forced to be as perfect as the oldest while avoiding the mistakes they made to get there. They are to be more efficient at being perfect because the path has been laid down and all they must do is follow it. They can’t complain because the oldest has it harder. They can’t be angry or sad or anything but grateful. That’s their curse

Not in love, not not in love but a secret third thing (in love but so fundamentally opposed that to love each other would be a betrayal of their very selves)

Sometimes a family is a men out for revenge against his ex-best friend who put him in prison for 10 years, his prison cell mate who is tall as a wall but also an extremely competent hacker, a 12 yo who can resurrect the dead and that's also running from her sister who's trying to kill her, and their resurrected dog.

Dude this freaking stuck with me

Do it. Take what you want. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you. Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.

R. F. Kuang, The Burning God

Rin and Venka hii 🤲🏼🫠

Sometimes I’m haunted by the fact that we will never know if letty ends up finding out victoire is alive. And the fact we won’t know too much about Anthony annd Griffin.

Babel, R.F Kuang

Like RF depicted white people and how blind they are perfectly

white people reading babel: nitpicking about characters and minor errors and “oh, it’s so unbelievable that [REDACTED] would betray them!” 

multilingual poc/people who’ve been colonized by britain: crying and sobbing about how babel so perfectly articulates and validates the collective trauma and lived experiences of our whole generation

“Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up. Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock.“

- R.F Kuang, Babel

omg this is my brain picked apart this book haunts me all the time

I was trying to work on my WIPs but this thought won't leave my mind. I find it incredibly heartbreaking and poignant how Babel is a book about the ones erased from history and yet it still fails in so many occasions in telling their stories (and how it is on purpose). SPOILERS AHEAD.

From the start, we never get to know Robin's name, the last thing he thinks about before the end, and this is his story, which makes the loss even more staggering (even though Robin remembering his mother at the end is also hopeful and tender, because he didn't lose that memory). Despite all the pages spent describing the tale of all those Babel and white people don't believe they're human deserving of rights, their stories are incomplete, lost, and not only because the book is written following Robin's perspective. It's the English fault if we never get to know more about the Hermes Society. Anthony is so important to the story, yet we only know a little about him: as soon as Robin dares to believe in creating his path with the Hermes Society, Anthony and the others are brutally murdered.

Griffin is–I could talk hours about Griffin. He is Robin's foil, his brother, the incarnation of where the story is heading. Since the beginning, he is there to remind us the golden years are just a dream. He is the Cassandra telling everyone that violence is the only way to change things, and he's right, but at what cost. We don't know anything about him. We only have scraps. His last words –which were of comfort, of hope, not a recrimination like Robin thought– are never showed to us. We'll never know the impressive work he did all his life to make way for the revolution. Sterling, Evie, Griffin and Anthony were probably as intertwined as the main quartet: what is their story? What happened between Griffin, rejected son, and Sterling, who calls professor Lovell Richard? Did they love each other before and while hate consumed them? (Of course they did.) What happened in Burma? How much of Robin's cohort is a terrible replica of Griffin's? How terrible it is that we never get to feel the depth of Griffin's grief when he learns Anthony is dead? We only see the moment Griffin and Sterling manage to kill each other, ending their portion of the story once and for all.

We, like Robin, see the possibility of learning more about these people taken away from us. Robin will never get to see Ramy again, they'll never meet Ramy's parents in Calcutta. Victorie barely remembers her native language, Griffin's was taken away from him almost entirely. It's so much loss, of knowledge, of potential, of people, the ending of the book really feels inevitable. And right at the end, when you could dare to hope for a better future, when Victorie chooses to live? The only hope is her, and the book telling the story of the people who took Babel under siege. The book is the only way Robin may ever get to say his side of the story to posterity. And we, the reader, won't get the see the future either.

andrew garfield for gq magazine

babel by rf kuang dunked on the british empire so hard that the queen had no choice but to take the L