Nguyen Quotes & Sayings

Writing is the only thing that makes me feel alive. — Mary Sage Nguyen

The main difference lies in wage levels, which is because our workers are not yet as well trained as in other countries. We are a poor country. This is why we must accept the conditions that prevail in international markets. But our trade unions do represent the rights of workers. — Nguyen Minh Triet

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

So I fell in love with Phi Phi, a harmless enough emotion. I was wont to fall in love two or three times a year and was now well past due. — 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

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

It's really easy to not be satisfied with your work, or people, or anything, but I really embrace the idea of not having to want [anything]. Not because you're denying yourself anything, but because it [everything] is already there. — Thao Nguyen

Landing on the shores of normalcy is wonderful, especially after being tossed around in the sea of sickness. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

I quietly quaffed my cognac, discreetly admiring Lana's legs. Longer than the Bible and a hell of a lot more fun, they stretched forever, like an Indian yogi or an American highway shimmering through the Great Plains or the southwestern desert. Her legs demanded to be looked at and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

To find perfectly ripe fruit, catch it. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

No more than two opinions or ideas on any one issue should be out there, the General said. Look at the voting system. Same concept. We had multiple parties and candidates and look at the mess we had. Here you choose the left hand or the right and that's more than enough. Two choices and look at all the drama with every presidential election. Even two choices may be one too many. One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less — Viet Thanh Nguyen

When standing in the middle of the marvelous mountains and deep forests, in the earthy smell of all beginnings and endings, I often find myself asking what I have if all my possessions were taken away. Without money, car, house; or power and fame, if there are any, who am I?
In that very moment, being away from the external voices and left alone in nature, I find my answer. — Zi 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

When you fall in love,
do not fall out of yourself. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Telling what must not be told is one of the writer's primary tasks. It is also a difficult and dangerous one. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made. — 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

Love is like a childs birth, it's special, amazing, it brings happieness, and you should cherish it, as it grows into somthing not perfect but becomes stronger within the bond between two people. — Binh Nguyen

Dreams are a good source for book ideas. — Mary Sage Nguyen

I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone. — Bich Minh Nguyen

You talk about your feelings. It's annoying and frustrating [...] But that's the point. You have to try. Because if you don't bother trying, then what's the point in being in a relationship? — Jenn P. Nguyen

You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single, solo inventor who, working late in the lab one night, makes an earthshaking discovery, and voila, overnight everything's changed. That's a very appealing picture; however, it's just not true. Medicine today is a team sport. — Nguyen Quyen

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

People always try to make self-published authors feel insignificant. I have more respect for self-published authors, because I know the adversity they faced. They didn't just write a manuscript, query letter, and blam book deal. These authors had to do it the difficult way. There is no publisher, or agents, investing time, and money into making their book. Just the indie author's manuscript, own currency, and persistence. — Mary Sage Nguyen

Standardized state tests are a scam! The educational system is rigged. It is set up to where the wealthy schools, get all of the state funding. The poverty-stricken schools, don't get enough funding due to standardized tests scores. See my point? — Mary Sage Nguyen

breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture - the threat, the interrogation. But it didn't happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC's head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time. (On his 1968 photograph of the summary street corner execution of prisoner Nguyen Van Lem by South Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan.) — Eddie Adams

If you lend the present,
it will never be returned. — Khang Kijarro 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

We also have no taboos against freedom of expression. Although I am president, I must confront the criticism of party members in my election district once every three months. In addition, people pay close attention to what my wife does and how my children live. — Nguyen Minh Triet

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 pregnant pause with enough gestation can give birth to a well formed idea. — Khang Kijarro 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

The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men. — Nguyen Van Thieu

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

We only invented the word organic because we made things inorganic.
We only invented the word natural because we made things unnatural.
We only invented the word permaculture because we made agriculture. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

I would not be myself without writing. — Mary Sage Nguyen

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

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

Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I never staged a coup. They picked me up. Like I say, they forced me to become premier, maybe hoping that by that way, they send me to the electric chair. — Nguyen Cao Ky

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

If the present is left unopened,
now, it is closed. — Khang Kijarro 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

My...principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; ...do not let her speak first...give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me...statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I would rather be considered an imbecile, than an old fashioned and dry gal. — Mary Sage Nguyen

This was what few people realize - it's hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse. — 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

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No, — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Through leadership of the fight against French colonialism, Ho Chi Minh had made a name for himself in the international political arena. — Nguyen Cao Ky

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

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

This is a breakthrough to science! How can I destroy it? It is beautiful! I have never encountered an unequally conjoined twin that was alive!"
Dr. Lisa Sen The Malevolent Twin — Mary Sage Nguyen

Setting sail using different moral compasses causes a relationship to go in circles. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Perfection can hide a lot of warts. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

The spectacle of the constabulary in the terminal with automatic weapons slung on their shoulders also made me homesick, confirming I was again in a country with its malnourished neck under a dictator's loafer. — 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

273. In order to hold on firmly to your faith, you must choose the Road of Hope followed by the disciples of Christ and not the road to death offered by the world. 274. Many people today repeatedly assert, "I — Van Thuan, Francis Xavier Nguyen

Everyone is always leaving each other, chasing down the next seeming opportunity - home or body. Where does it stop? Does it ever? I want to believe it all leads to something grander than the imagination, grander than the end-stop of the Pacific. Or is that it: You get to the place where you land; you are tired now; you settle. You settle. You build a home and raise a family. There are years of eating and arguing, working and waking. There are years of dying. No one knows what the last image will be. — Bich Minh Nguyen

One man's distraction is another man's refuge. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Noses to the wind, we inhaled a farrago of scents: charcoal and jasmine, rotting fruit and eucalyptus, gasoline and ammonia, a swirling belch from the city's poorly irrigated gut. — 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

Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat? — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I will always choose to be an imbecile. I couldn't cut it as an old fashion, and dry gal. — Mary Sage Nguyen

Let's see, he had told me one night at our hotel's bar, I've been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn, — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Saigon, U.S.A. aptly documents the birth of a new American community, uprooted in the aftermath of war and forever torn apart by the wounds of the past, yet one capable of healing against all odds. An engrossing yet succinct film that captures not only a major incident in Vietnamese American life, but also an important chapter of American history. A profound film that manages to confront us with the deepest sorrow while allowing us to be hopeful about what it means to be human. — Nguyen Qui Duc

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

Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live. — 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

I would rather spend money on something, that fulfills me for eternity. Rather, than something that fulfills me for only an hour or two. — Mary Sage Nguyen

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

If you fatally kill fate,
your life sentence will be
to steer the reins of choice. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

We don't succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do. — 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

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

In the economy we guarantee all market players the same conditions, and the private sector plays an increasingly important role. We are in the process of dissolving thousands of state-owned companies and converting them into stock corporations. We even plan to accelerate this development. In contrast, it is the party's responsibility to improve the lives of the people, and this is where our citizens have great confidence in us. Party members who commit crimes are severely punished. — Nguyen Minh Triet

We respect the freedom of all citizens. Young people should have fun, but there is no tolerance of drug abuse. Drugs have become a serious problem in Vietnam. This is why we have very strict penalties for any sort of drug dealing. — Nguyen Minh Triet

None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968 ... Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops ... Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces. — Chalmers Johnson

You'll never know another man's struggle. You'll never know another man's pain. — David Reon Nguyen

Amnesia of both past failure and success is the best way forward. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Having rebound sex to cure a heartbreak is like drinking alcohol to cure a hangover. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Anyone can take a false step And fall forever, Everyone is different. Where are they now, all those lost souls? — Nguyen Du

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

It's precarious to hang onto the veracity of memory because its edges are smoothed by the river of time. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Do precedes done.
No precedes none. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was appointed by Governor Gray Davis to the Los Angeles Superior Court and by President Obama to the district court and then the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In securing the state court appointment, I think it really helped that I had some trial experience. — Jacqueline 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

Happiness or misfortune are prescribed by law of Heaven, but their source comes from ourselves. — Nguyen Du

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

If you lock the door on sorrow,
how will it leave your heart? — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

I had been active in various bar associations ever since I was a law student, and I think that also helped because it made me more of a known quantity. — Jacqueline Nguyen

Writing makes it easier to cope with life. — Mary Sage 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