Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes & Sayings

What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans,those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese things and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I pitied the French for their naivete in believing that they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur's imaginations and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I wanted to wrap her in my arms and brush my eyelashes against hers in butterfly kisses. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

One must be grateful for one's education no matter how it arrives. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I'm forty-six years old and I don't care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she's wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

With that, the conversation finally exhausted itself, leaving us to nuzzle our cocktails with the affection one reserved for puppies. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Here was one representative example of Richard Hedd's highly esteemed Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction: The Vietnamese peasant will not object to the use of airpower, for he is apolitical, interested only in feeding himself and his family. Bombing his village will of course upset him, but the cost is outweighed ultimately by how airpower will persuade him that he is on the wrong side if he chooses communism, which cannot protect him. (p. 126) — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Your problem isn't that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you're thinking. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

(Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.) At — Viet Thanh Nguyen

For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn't want to learn Japanese, why I didn't already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn't my culture right here since I was born here? — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WROTE THAT "if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything. That means you can't change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres's someone who feels much worse. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed — Viet Thanh Nguyen

What am I dying for? he cried back. I'm dying because this world I'm living in isn't worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you've got a reason to live. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Napoleon said men will die for bits of ribbon pinned to their chests, but the General understands that even more men will die for a man who remembered their names, as he does theirs. When he inspects them, he walks among them, eats with them, calls them by their names and asks about wives, children, girlfriends, hometowns. All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered. Neither is possible without the other. This desire drives these busboys, waiters, janitors, gardeners, mechanics, night guards, and welfare beneficiaries to save enough money to buy themselves uniforms, boots, and guns, to want to be men again. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The word that identified what we did not possess was "money," . . . The other word was "votes," so that together "money votes" was "open sesame" to the deep caverns of the American political system. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Disarming an idealist was easy — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it's been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians. Nothing — Viet Thanh Nguyen

For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Easier to get a gun here than to vote or drive. You — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

...the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do...is to actually do the right thing. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. James Fenton, "A German Requiem — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The more logical conclusion was that the General had bolstered the Vietnamese tendency for conspiracy with the American trait of paranoia, admittedly with my help. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

And yet at Yan'an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term, but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Always resent, never relent. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Not for the first time, I longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

One did not depend on marines for good table manners. One depended on them to have the right instincts when it came to matters of life and death. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he'd feel the exact same thing. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it. I — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps — Viet Thanh Nguyen

They were average specimens of national manhood, slim and gaunt with deeply tanned skin from riding in jeeps and on motorcycles. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends — Viet Thanh Nguyen

His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood's high priests understood innately the observation of Milton's Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l'oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

no one asks poor people if they want war. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

lmost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

By now the only part of me not sweating were my eyeballs... An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel... — Viet Thanh Nguyen

breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

He responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only was my fly undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human - if God exists - He didn't intend for us to be slaves to each other. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

But after the bottle was empty sometime that night, I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. Now — Viet Thanh Nguyen

cheered by the optimism that one sometimes had at the beginning of strenuous exercise, a kind of helium that filled our lungs and carried us along — Viet Thanh Nguyen

During our visits, he consumed an embarrassingly varied assortment of cheap beer and wine, vacillating between fury and melancholy as one might imagine Richard Nixon to be doing not far away. Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Don't you see that Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also better to be hated than ignored. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Refugees such as ourselves could never dare question the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth. But Dr. Hedd was beyond reproach, for he was an English immigrant. His very existence as such validated the legitimacy of the former colonies, while his heritage and accent triggered the latent Anglophilia and inferiority complex found in many Americans. Dr. Hedd was clearly aware of his privilege and was amused at the discomfort he was causing his American hosts. It — Viet Thanh Nguyen

No wonder, then, that I was drawn to the General, who, like my friends Man and Bon, never sneered about my muddled heritage. Upon selecting me for his staff, the General said, The only thing I'm interested in is how good you are at what you do, even if the things I ask you to do may not be so good. I — Viet Thanh Nguyen

One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both. At — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don't understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars - many of which this country has had a hand in. Although — Viet Thanh Nguyen

They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Despite the chronic shortages of almost every good and commodity, there was no shortage of paper, since everyone in the neighborhood was required to write confessions on a periodic basis. Even — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Really ingenious, he said. He had a Minnesotan's admiration for resourcefulness in the face of hardship, bred by generations of people one very bad winter away from starvation and cannibalism. I — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many "super" terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam? — Viet Thanh Nguyen

More than all those people who starved by famine, it was the thought of my mother not remembering what she looked like as a little girl that saddened me. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I had won the argument, but somehow, as in our college days, he had won the audience. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness - that's a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it. It — Viet Thanh Nguyen

He's the best thing that could have happened to us, I said. And that was no lie. It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right , a dilemma none of us who wanted participate in history could escape. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others? And is it sane or insane to believe, as so many around us apparently do, in nothing? We can only answer these questions for ourselves. Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables. Thus magnetized by experience, our compass continually points toward those who suffer. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word "murder" made us mumble as much as the word "masturbation." Still, — Viet Thanh Nguyen

While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

part spy thriller, part cultural and political reclamation, The Sympathizer — Viet Thanh Nguyen

If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth? — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Although I was too tactful to ask about politics or religion, I learned that she was socially and economically progressive. She believed in birth control, gun control, and rent control; she believed in the liberation of homosexuals and civil rights for all; she believed in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh; she believed in nonviolence, world peace, and yoga; she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs; she believed in national self-determination for the Third World as well as liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, which was, she said, to believe that the invisible hand of the market should wear the kid glove of socialism. Her — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word. At least that's one way I've figured out hot to describe love. — Viet Thanh Nguyen