Quotes & Sayings About Saigon

Before the 'Fast & Furious' promo in Manila, I went on a vacation in the Philippines 10 years earlier. I loved it. My 'Miss Saigon' friends showed me around. — Luke Evans

In the modern operas that 'Miss Saigon' and 'Les Miz' are, nobody breaks out into song from conventional book dialogue. Everything is sung from beginning to end, including the recitative. — Lea Salonga

One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity? — Joan Didion

A Saigon Proverb: Doe la chine tran, neu buon la thua. Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat. — Kim Thuy

Saigonese corruption was incapacitating, a malignancy that poisoned the entire system of government. Graft was the main preoccupation of those on the Saigon side, Vann learned, absorbing more time and thought than any other concern and summoning considerable ingenuity from people who were incompetent at the task they were supposed to perform. — Anonymous

In 1975, the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with U.S. helicopters seeking to rescue leading U.S. personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon. — Martin Jacques

If one little old general in shirt sleeves can take Saigon, think about 200 million Chinese comin' down those trails. No sir, I don't want to fight them. — Lyndon B. Johnson

One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?'
I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.'
'What did you want?'
'Nothing,' I said. 'To stay alive.'
'That's all?'
'Yes. — Tim O'Brien

If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one. That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me. His name? Rob Roy. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon. — Peter Nichols

Local authorities keep an eye on proceedings. The Saigon Protestant Church in Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, one of the biggest in the country, has to submit a list of its event schedules, financial records and appointments of Church leaders to government officials for their prior approval. — Insight Guides

Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end. — Tatjana Soli

Imagine that
a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them
and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began! — Malcolm X

Post-Traumatic Stress Injury isn't a disease. It's a wound to the soul that never heals. — Tom Glenn

I've found cinnamon to be very effective for lowering the glycemic response to meals. People have heard that before, but I didn't realize how profound it could be until I did the actual testing with continuous glucose monitors. And I tested all different varieties and species of cinnamon from Ceylon to Saigon. — Timothy Ferriss

I hate being told I can't do something because I'm a girl! — Thanhha Lai

A first novel of astonishing force, craft and beauty, The Headmaster's Wager conjures up a dizzyingly evocative wartime Saigon in the story of Percival Chen, a Chinese schoolmaster in Vietnam. This extraordinary book made me weep. Read it. — Janice Y.K. Lee

I'm privileged to have had some success, but I've never forgotten what it was like to queue for a half-crown gallery seat for 'Oliver!' which is why I ensure that there are £20 day tickets for 'Miss Saigon' and that the balconies in my theatres are as comfortable as I can possibly make them. — Cameron Mackintosh

No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.-Inside Out and Back Again — Thanhha Lai

I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you're going to see your country differently, you're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It's not what Tom Friedman writes about; I'm sorry. You're going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can't get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people - Americans and Europeans - come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on. — Henry Rollins

I was 17 when I auditioned for 'Miss Saigon.' I really grew up doing that show. I pretty much knew, almost a year into 'Miss Saigon,' that I was going to be a performer, that I was going to be singing and acting. — Lea Salonga

Saigon was loved precisely because it was so unlovable - its squalor, its biblical, Job-like misfortune, its imminent, hoevering doom. — Tatjana Soli

When helicopters were snatching people from the grounds of the American embassy compound during the panic of the final Vietcong push into Saigon, I was sitting in front of the television set shouting, Get the chefs! Get the chefs! — Calvin Trillin

We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see. — Neil Sheehan

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name ... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase. — James Fenton

The crickets got quiet and the wind died down. It was so still, I felt like the world had stopped.

-Russell Ray Teague, When Saigon Surrendered:
a Kentucky Mystery — James Aura

One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting. — George Packer

'Miss Saigon' taught me what it means to help carry a big show, and it had some of the most gorgeous songs wrote. — Will Chase

Helen's Saigon had always been about selling - chickens, information, or lovely young women, it didn't matter. It had once been called the Pearl of the Orient, but by people who had not been there in a very long time. Saigon had never been Paris, but now it was a garrison town, unlovely, a stinking refugee shantyville filled with the angry, the betrayed, the dispossessed, but she had made it her home, and she couldn't bear that soon she would have to leave. — Tatjana Soli

I played more performances of 'Chris' in 'Miss Saigon' than anyone else. — Will Chase

Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward his destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. People glare at one another and fight for maneuvering space. All parties are equally determined to get the right-of-way
insist on it. They swerve away at the last possible moment, giving scant inches to spare. The victor goes forwards, no time for a victory grin, already engaging in another contest of will. Saigon traffic is Vietnamese life, a continuous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders. — Andrew X. Pham

During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam. — Gerald R. Ford

I took some voice lessons here and there as a teenager but nothing too serious. I started taking it more seriously when I was in Miss Saigon. I needed to improve my technique in order to survive doing that show as many time a week as I was doing it. It's not an easy show to sing, so I needed all the help I could get. — Lea Salonga

Saigon is hot, full of atmosphere, activity, and commerce. — Brendan Fraser

Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy's Tony Lamas do to you? There's a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go from your own fiefdom, the more ludicrous are your haircut, your clothes, your opinions, your life. Within easy walking distance of home are neighborhoods that might as well be in Saigon. — Michael Cunningham

When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago. — Dick Pirozzolo

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

Years after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, books, he came to Paris with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. He said, I just wanted to hear your voice. She said, it's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of China. He knew she'd begun writing books, he'd heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Saigon. And about her younger brother, and he'd been grieved for her. Then he didn't know what to say. And then he told her. Told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, he could never stop loving her, that he'd love her until death. — Marguerite Duras

The nice thing about doing a pop opera - in the way that doing, say, 'Miss Saigon' or 'Les Miz' would be - is that, because the convention is set from the beginning that this is an opera and everything is sung, there is never that feeling of 'Why is this person bursting out into song?' because the whole thing is sung. — Lea Salonga

Phi cang Saigon Tansonnhut"

"He puzzled at the meaning and smiled inwardly. The sign probably said, "Welcome and Affectionate Salutations to All Who Enter the Glorious Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Home of Seventh Air Force, Only Minutes from Beautiful Saigon." Or maybe not; he couldn't know. Maybe it read, "Welcome to the Dung Heap of Despair - Abandon Cheer, All Ye Who Enter. — Tony Taylor