Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?

In their working outfits as busboys, waiters, gardeners, filed hands, fishermen, manual laborers, custodians, or simply the un- and underemployed, these shabby examples of the lumpen blended into the background wherever they happened to be, always seen as a mass, never noticed as individuals.

What am I dying for? [...] 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.

No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.

After love, was sadness not the most common noun in our lyrical repertoire? Did we salivate for sadness, or had we on learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?

We shared a passion for words, but I preferred the silence of writing while she loved to talk. She

I'd Love You To Want Me" was the theme song of the bachelors and unhappily married males of my generation, whether in the English original or the equally superb French and Vietnamese renditions. 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.

And we all swooned, just a little, and dreamed that one day we, too, could board a steamer ship for the metropole with nothing more than a suitcase, a scholarship, and an inferiority complex.

To be anti-American only makes you a reactionary. In our case, having defeated the Americans, we no longer defined ourselves as anti-American. We are simply one hundred percent Vietnamese.

In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain.

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

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.

Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it.

What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionaries 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?

You aren't afraid of the things you believe in," he

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.

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

would fall in love with the young, handsome,

The father of one of the dead children cried, My God, why are You doing this to us? And it struck us all then, the answer to humanity's eternal question of Why? It was, and is, simply this: Why not?

Another affordable way to add a drop of loveliness to the world was not to change it but to change how one saw it.

college in Orange County, an hour away by car. It was the birthplace of the war criminal Richard Nixon, as well as the home of John Wayne, a place so ferociously patriotic I thought Agent Orange might have been manufactured there or at least named in its honor.

I've tried love," Louis said, as if it were a kind of soft, malodorous French cheese. "It's okay, but the problem with it is the other person involved. She has a mind of her own. You can't say the same thing about things.

I was a little person who spoke an immigrant version of his language, the language of a country that basked in the best of both worlds: to have once been an imperial power that had mugged weaker countries at gunpoint, while no longer being an imperial power and having to deal with pesky things like mosquitoes and malaria or resentment and revolutions.

Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth.