Viet 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

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

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

Our job here is to defend freedom. — Viet D. Dinh

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

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 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

If I remember correctly, pages 26, 42, 58, 77, 91, 103 and 118, basically all the places in the script where one of my people has a speaking part, he or she screams. No words, just screams. So you should at least get the screams right. — Viet Thanh 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

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

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

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

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

They lived in this fashion for most of the year before the credit line of her patience finally reached its limit. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

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

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead. — 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

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

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

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

After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else's freedom and independence. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Government finally decided
To wage the war all-out. Defeat
is Un-American.
And they took to the air,
Their women beside them
in bouffant hairdos
putting nail-polish on the
gunship cannon-buttons.
And they never came down
for they found,
the ground
is Pro-Communist. And dirty.
And the insects side with the Viet Cong. — Gary Snyder

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 need not look in the mirror or at the faces of my fellow men to find a likeness to God. I need only look at their selves and inside my own to realize we would not be killers if God Himself was not one, too. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

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

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

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

Perhaps the main reason America cannot 'get over' its war with Viet Nam is that Americans cannot fit what happened into its earlier myth of itself - that we had always been 'the good guys,' conquering injustice around the world. The tens of thousands of mistreated half-American children born in Viet Nam are one untidy fact we have been unable to fit into that myth. — Trin Yarborough

blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After — 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

Movies were America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies. — 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

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 seen Star Wars a dozen times on video tape, and if anyone was so deprived as to have not watched it even once, then the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution. — 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

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

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth. — Daniel Keys Moran

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

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

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

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell. Why's — Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

All of us who are living are dying. The only ones not dying are the dead.,,To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one's own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

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

Like its Senate counterpart, H.R. 1908 is the product of years of bipartisan collaboration. And now, by passing S. 1145, the U.S. Senate has a similar opportunity to restore our patent regime to its rightful position of protecting inventors' property rights and spurring innovation. These are values that all Americans should rally behind. — Viet D. Dinh

... Ending a conflict is not so simple, not just calling it off and coming home. Because the price for that kind of peace could be a thousand years of darkness for generation's Viet Nam borned. — Ronald Reagan

Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything. — 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 ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong, — Muhammad Ali

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

I think an ethical lawyer would absolutely refuse, if he or she had knowledge that this is the purpose for which her work would be used, that is, to conceal a fraudulent scheme from federal regulators. — Viet D. Dinh

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

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

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

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

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

The under-funded and over-extended United States Patent and Trademark Office does not have the resources to adequately evaluate the burgeoning number of applications, and too many low-quality patents are being issued as a result. — Viet D. Dinh

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

The one consistent policy running through this [Clinton] administration is the love it has lavished on Marxists
food aid for North Korea, diplomatic recognition of the Hanoi regime, chronic kowtowing to Beijing and now doing Castro's dirty work. How can the Clinton gang
which carried the Viet Cong flag during anti-war demonstrations and decorated their dorm rooms with pictures of Che Guevara
not feel contempt for people who insist, with every fiber of their being, that communism is mankind's mortal enemy? — Don Feder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

no one asks poor people if they want war. — 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

It became very clear that Hanoi was in effect strategically running the Viet Cong operation. — William Westmoreland

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

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

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

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

Just like the Alamo, somebody damn well needed to go to their aid. Well, by God, I'm going to Viet Nam's aid! — Lyndon B. Johnson

I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a <>. — Muhammad Ali

breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

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