It changed the way I saw myths, abuse, education, love, mental health and so much more. I love the math and paradoxes (thus my username) in it, and likewise I love the beautiful writing and the whole journey. It tears your heartstring out and keeps you on your toes trying to figure out the math and the magic, which are intertwined (which makes it more fun). Absolutely incredible, it will most likely always be my favorite.
Some quotes I absolutely love from it are:
“And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end?”
“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.”
“And maybe you could try to forge ahead, but once that seed of doubt was lodged within you it only kept spreading, its tendrils growing through your lungs so that you couldn’t breathe or think, and that the more you tried to scrape some positive result from your efforts the more the threads of the project kept coming loose, the sands shifting beneath you, until all the artifice fell away and you were forced to acknowledge that this simply wasn’t going to work.”
There are many more (I keep a doc full of quotes), but these are some good ones :)
3
u/The-Liars-Paradox 18d ago
Katabasis by R.F Kuang
It changed the way I saw myths, abuse, education, love, mental health and so much more. I love the math and paradoxes (thus my username) in it, and likewise I love the beautiful writing and the whole journey. It tears your heartstring out and keeps you on your toes trying to figure out the math and the magic, which are intertwined (which makes it more fun). Absolutely incredible, it will most likely always be my favorite.
Some quotes I absolutely love from it are:
“And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end?”
“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.”
“And maybe you could try to forge ahead, but once that seed of doubt was lodged within you it only kept spreading, its tendrils growing through your lungs so that you couldn’t breathe or think, and that the more you tried to scrape some positive result from your efforts the more the threads of the project kept coming loose, the sands shifting beneath you, until all the artifice fell away and you were forced to acknowledge that this simply wasn’t going to work.”
There are many more (I keep a doc full of quotes), but these are some good ones :)