Top 100 Thanh Quotes
#1. Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.
Noam Chomsky
#2. Tan Chau lies on the Thanh Hoa canal, which sings with freedom as it flows into the Mekong River on its way to the sea. Only the wind and the water, which you cannot imprison, are truly free.
James D. Redwood
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both. At
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I had won the argument, but somehow, as in our college days, he had won the audience.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#24. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#26. Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#28. 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
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. They were average specimens of national manhood, slim and gaunt with deeply tanned skin from riding in jeeps and on motorcycles.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#34. (Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.) At
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#35. If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#36. Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#37. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#38. blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#44. 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
#45. The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#47. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#56. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#57. 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
#59. Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. They lived in this fashion for most of the year before the credit line of her patience finally reached its limit.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. ...the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do...is to actually do the right thing.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#81. Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres's someone who feels much worse.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#85. Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#86. She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#87. Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#88. Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#89. 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
#90. These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it. I
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
