“I do not fear death. I fear only that my rage will fade over time.”
Kurapika Quotes
4 quotes from Hunter x Hunter, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
“A blow to my pride is nothing. Not when compared to my clan's suffering.”
Episode four, and he is swallowing an insult in a queue. The Hunter Exam is full of people who cannot be provoked because they are too strong to care, and Kurapika is not one of them: he is a teenager with a famously short fuse whose eyes physically change color when his temper goes, which is the least convenient trait available to somebody planning a long revenge. So the restraint here is not temperament, it is budgeting. He has decided in advance what his anger is for and declines to spend any of it on a stranger in a line. Read against the boy who admits a few episodes later that he knew a prisoner's spider tattoo was a fake from the moment he saw it and went red anyway, this is the discipline before it breaks, and the series takes care to show it holding first.
“There are two things that collectors always want. The first is any item of extreme rarity. The second is colleagues to whom they can brag about their collection.”
The whole Yorknew arc runs on this, and it is worth noticing that a teenager worked it out. Kurapika's problem is structural: his clan's eyes are scattered among private buyers who have no reason at all to advertise, and no amount of strength locates a man who does not wish to be found. So he stops hunting people and starts hunting a behavior. The second sentence is the operative one, because it says the market has a social function, and a market with a social function has an auction, and an auction has a guest list. Everything that follows, up to taking a bodyguard post with a mafia family, comes out of having correctly modeled the psychology of the men who bought his family's eyes. It is a detective's line in a series everyone remembers for a nuclear old man.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I must get those two back — that is my top priority. I've lost too many people already. I will not lose my friends!”
He is holding Chrollo Lucilfer, the man he built a life around killing, and he trades him. Gon and Killua are being held elsewhere and the exchange is not a dilemma the story agonizes over for an episode: Kurapika states the priority and does it. What that commits him to is the rest of his character. The rage he was frightened of losing in the first episode is still present, but it has been demoted below a few months' acquaintance with two children he met at an exam, and the demotion turns out to be permanent. Nothing later undoes it. He spends the remainder of the series colder, more damaged and considerably more effective, and the one thing he never does again is put the revenge back at the top of the list.
Read Kurapika's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Every list has it, which is the first problem, and it is spoken in the first episode, which is the second. A storm has left most of the applicants seasick, the ship's captain has pulled aside the three who are not, and Kurapika answers the question about why he wants a license by revealing that he is the last of the Kurta and intends to destroy the Phantom Troupe. The captain calls it suicide. So the most-quoted sentence in the series is a statement of intent delivered before the character has done anything, by a boy the story has not yet tested. What it promises is that he will hold on to the rage. Fifty-seven episodes later he has Chrollo Lucilfer captured, has to choose between the revenge he organized his whole life around and two friends being held elsewhere, and gives up the revenge. That is the better line and nobody quotes it.