Nam Le Quotes & Sayings

I do believe that you can never know yourself let alone the person next to you let alone the person halfway across the world. Yet at the same time I believe there is nothing like fiction to fully thrust you into someone else s consciousness. — Nam Le

The river was behind him. The wind was full of acid. In the slow float of light I looked away, down at the river. On the brink of freezing, it gleamed in large, bulging blisters. The water, where it still moved, was black and braided. And it occurred to me then how it took hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over - to hold in its skin the perfect and crystalline world - and how that world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable. — Nam Le

I write under not only the presumption that everything I write is deeply conditioned by everything I've already written, but that everything I write changes, retroactively, all those things I've already written. — Nam Le

-honor won in youth grows with age. — Nam Le

You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either -- you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide. — Nam Le

That was the problem with Alison Fischer: you never knew which part of her to look at. He looked at her face — Nam Le

He looked out the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kilometers away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind. — Nam Le

The thing is not to write what no one else has written but to write what only you could have written.'
I found this fragment in my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how a voice hollows how words you once loved can wither on a page. — Nam Le

Art, after all, is - at its best - a lie that tells us the truth. — Nam Le

If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if you treat it as the answer to a question you're asking yourself every day, just by being there. — Nam Le