Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

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.

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

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

If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?

I could live without television, but not without books.

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.

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.

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

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends

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.

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.

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

Your problem isn't that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you're thinking.

Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.

Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing there's someone who feels much worse.

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.

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.