An Thanh Quotes

#1. Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Disarming an idealist was easy

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#8. 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

#9. breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#10. Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#11. These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#12. 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

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

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#14. Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#15. She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#16. Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#17. This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. And yet at Yan'an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#22. Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#23. 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

#24. One must be grateful for one's education no matter how it arrives.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#28. By now the only part of me now seating were my eyeballs.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#29. 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

#30. What am I dying for? he cried back. I'm dying because this world I'm living in isn't worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you've got a reason to live.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#31. 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

#32. They lived in this fashion for most of the year before the credit line of her patience finally reached its limit.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#33. So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#43. happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game,

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#44. 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

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

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#46. 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

#47. Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#48. This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and

Viet Thanh Nguyen