Top 100 Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes

#1. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #6547
#2. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #15379
#3. By now the only part of me now seating were my eyeballs.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #68274
#4. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #113129
#5. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #157465
#6. They lived in this fashion for most of the year before the credit line of her patience finally reached its limit.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #160136
#7. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #200862
#8. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #236800
#9. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #240988
#10. The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #246174
#11. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #269604
#12. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #292874
#13. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #311799
#14. Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #318334
#15. happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game,

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #319584
#16. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #336851
#17. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #377941
#18. Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #398649
#19. This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #400828
#20. A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it. I

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #404554
#21. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #415332
#22. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #421087
#23. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #454197
#24. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #456940
#25. Disarming an idealist was easy

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #478016
#26. What was it like to live in a time when one's fate was not war, when one was not led by the craven and the corrupt, when one's country was not a basket case kept alive only through the intravenous drip of American aid?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #494134
#27. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #514367
#28. Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #539109
#29. She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #552664
#30. Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #565867
#31. This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #568378
#32. Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #579402
#33. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #676802
#34. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #690246
#35. If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #731278
#36. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #751671
#37. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #788429
#38. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #798998
#39. no one asks poor people if they want war.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #808499
#40. in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #835088
#41. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #857963
#42. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #916153
#43. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #917652
#44. I had won the argument, but somehow, as in our college days, he had won the audience.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #918459
#45. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #925586
#46. One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both. At

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #932684
#47. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #951619
#48. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #953281
#49. Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #969037
#50. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #973251
#51. Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1006685
#52. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1031740
#53. We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1058592
#54. The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1076177
#55. Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1095053
#56. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1096345
#57. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1137870
#58. blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1162284
#59. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1166911
#60. They were average specimens of national manhood, slim and gaunt with deeply tanned skin from riding in jeeps and on motorcycles.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1182875
#61. people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1191148
#62. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1192028
#63. Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1205711
#64. A person's strength was always his weakness, and vice versa.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1210601
#65. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1220391
#66. Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1271289
#67. With that, the conversation finally exhausted itself, leaving us to nuzzle our cocktails with the affection one reserved for puppies.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1281873
#68. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1286802
#69. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1304080
#70. The unseen is almost always underlined with the unsaid.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1375591
#71. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1376395
#72. He tried to forget what he'd discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1383461
#73. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1393509
#74. Let's just hope history forgets the snafus.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1396047
#75. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1410256
#76. I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1446814
#77. give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1456913
#78. Your problem isn't that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you're thinking.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1461339
#79. I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1527822
#80. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1530944
#81. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1545055
#82. Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1549412
#83. Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1555146
#84. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and brush my eyelashes against hers in butterfly kisses.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1557326
#85. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1561846
#86. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1610584
#87. Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1647965
#88. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1653103
#89. But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1735559
#90. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1740527
#91. Revolutionaries are insomniacs, too afraid of history's nightmare to sleep, too troubled by the world's ills to be less than awake.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1747508
#92. While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1748926
#93. For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1763762
#94. Easier to get a gun here than to vote or drive. You

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1764819
#95. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1772054
#96. That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1782933
#97. When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1799153
#98. 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

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1834391
#99. I had been resigned to the consolation of man's best friend, i.e., self-pleasure, and certainly did not possess the wherewithal to consort with prostitutes.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1849815
#100. One must be grateful for one's education no matter how it arrives.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes #1872973

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