But Viet Quotes & Sayings

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I got booted out third, but to me [Last Comic Standing] was a lot like Rambo II ... I don't really remember much ... there was rats, people bombing, screaming, yelling, and a middle aged guy with a shaved chest got beat by somebody from the Viet Cong. — Rob Cantrell

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

Wait a second," Andy said, snapping his fingers. "You're Vietnamese." "Don't say it," Sun warned. But Andy, a grin stretched across his face, couldn't resist. "You're a Vietnam vet." Sun's face became even harder, something Andy hadn't thought possible. "Never heard that one before. Open the pen there." Andy lifted the latch on the gate and Sun led the sheep out of the pen and over to the entrance door. "I've visited Viet Nam twice," Andy said. "Beautiful place. All of those war movies make it look like hell, but it's actually very tranquil, don't you think?" "I wouldn't know. I've never been there. I'm an American. — Lee Goldberg

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

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

No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do no, it was truly impossible, for how I choose me againse myself? — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The American soldiers were brave, but courage is not enough. David did not kill Goliath just because he was brave. He looked up at Goliath and realized that if he fought Goliath's way with a sword, Goliath would kill him. But if he picked up a rock and put it in his sling, he could hit Goliath in the head and knock Goliath down and kill him. David used his mind when he fought Goliath. So did we Vietnamese when we had to fight the Americans. — Vo Nguyen Giap

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

We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I'm shooting a gangbanger, but as a dignified man. That's pretty much what war photography did: seeing images of soldiers in a dignified way. They might have been killers in Vietnam, but I'm seeing another side of them, and looking at images of the the American soldiers, also the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong - I never saw an enemy. — Jamel Shabazz

Throughout his life, General Wesley Clark has stood up to some tough opponents. He battled the Viet Cong, and went toe-to-toe with Slobodan Milosevic. But today the retired four-star general capitulated to the fiercest enemy he's ever confronted: the American voter. — Jon Stewart

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

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

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

You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first. — Ho Chi Minh

But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

My name Quan. Quan Nguyen. This Kim-Ly, wife. We next door. Do nails. We with Mr. Blaylock. He fight, we fight. We come here from Viet Nam. This good country, but sometimes, good people in good country have to fight. — Dan Groat

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

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The overthrow of the communist regime is clearly its objective, but how far is it willing to go? While the Fraternity asks for donations to help refugees, these funds may possibly be going toward a Movement of armed refugees in Thailand. Rumors are that the Fraternity has invested in certain businesses whose profits it reaps. The most disappointing aspect of the Fraternity is the false hope it peddles to our countrymen that we can one day take our country back through force. We would be better off if we pursued reconciliation peacefully, in the hopes that one day we in exile can return to help rebuild our country. — 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

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

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. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The beer had the color and taste of baby's pee, but we followed our usual routine and drank with joyless discipline until we both passed out. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I dont think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Viet-Nam, against the Communists. — John F. Kennedy

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

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

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

You're too sympathetic, the General said. You didn't see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you've been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man's mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn't it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness... — 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

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

I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air? — 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

But the Viet-Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun. — Bernard B. Fall

I think that the question is very clear-cut, not only as a matter of ethics, but also as a matter of law, that a lawyer should not be aiding and abetting in a fraudulent scheme, and part of that aiding and abetting would be to draw up subsequent documents in order to conceal the true nature of the scheme from federal investigators. — Viet D. Dinh

I could smell the Viet Cong, really, I could smell Charlie. It wasn't just his body sweat or the urine. There were times when I could hear the breathing, real quiet; you could hear a person breathe, and I'd know he was in there, and I didn't go any farther. I just said to myself: In this dark corner of a tunnel is where the animal belongs, a rodent belongs. I'm becoming like a rodent, but still I don't belong. Yes, I could smell Charlie. And he knew me. The type of cologne I used, the aftershave - that's when we stopped using it altogether. But there was more than that. There was the scent that told you there was somebody in the tunnels. We became so tuned up after a while that when the other person would flick an eyelid up or down, you really knew he was there, in the corner, not even hiding anymore. Just sitting and waiting. They were the ones you never killed. You just backed out and told them up above the tunnel was cold. — Tom Mangold

There are more of you and he than you can probably imagine, but most are ashamed and seek to disappear in the foliage of American life. But your numbers are growing, and democracy gives you the best chance of finding your voice. Here you can learn how not to be torn apart by your opposing sides, but rather to balance them and benefit from both. Reconcile your divided allegiances and you will be the ideal translator between two sides, a goodwill ambassador to bring opposing nations to peace! — Viet Thanh Nguyen

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications. — 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

Hillary Clinton will travel to Vietnam with the president this Friday. It's a fact that at the height of the war in 1971, she tried to enlist in the Marines, but they turned her down. Apparently we weren't that mad at the Viet Cong. — Argus Hamilton

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

Some might say I was seeing things, but the true optical illusion was in seeing others and oneself as undivided and whole, as if being in focus was more real than being out of focus. We thought our reflection in the mirror was who we truly were, when how we saw ourselves and how others saw us was often not the same. Likewise, — Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life! — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I could live without television, but not without books. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The moment the earthquake hits, Ted has a premonition: a burning sensation on his feet. Not the pins and needles from sitting cross-legged for too long, but like the restlessness of the soles after standing on the subway for an hour. Like the blood wants to burst from his skin. No blinding vision, no sudden trance - it's not until weeks later that he realizes what the feeling was. But in the future, he won't tell the story this way. — Viet Dinh