Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

She wondered what, if anything, she knew about love. Not much, perhaps, but enough to know that what she would do for him now she would do again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

Why should I worry about deviating from the masses when I am also me and myself? Am I not a mass? Am I not already a collective? Do I not contain multitudes? Am I not a universe unto myself? Am I not always infinitely dialectical as I synthesize the thesis of me and the antithesis of myself?

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends. Wouldn't you agree, Commandant?

As for the name they called me, it upset me less than my reaction to it.

And even if we are inscrutable, what does that make white people? Are white people ever referred to as inscrutable? No, you would say that a white person who is hard to read has a poker face, which has a positive connotation, a strategic one, suggesting a careful withholding of information, whereas we are just inscrutable because you white people believe that we always have something to hide

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.

We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else's pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. 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.

I cleared my throat of a sour taste, the gastric reflux of my confused Oriental and Occidental insides.

He was attired like an asshole, which is to say that he wore the long black tails, gray slacks, and top hat of an English gentleman or a nineteenth-century European nobleman, their refined manners and exquisite fashions suiting them perfectly for overseeing genocidal empires that looted nonwhite countries, enslaving and/or massacring their inhabitants, and sanctifying the results with the name "civilization.

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape.

The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles. After

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.

B]ooks mean something different when return to them later, leavened with age.

They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.

while pain is universal, it is also utterly private.

Bang bang was the sound of memory's pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon.

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.

To avoid talking, we both smoked incessantly and listened to a greatest hits tape of Johnny Hallyday, the sonic equivalent of Ricard Pastis, a taste the rest of the world could not acquire.

Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover - our own.

There's a reason why saints are martyred. Nobody can stand them.

I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist.

There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was "to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.

All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered.

A nineteenth-century Russian novel and vodka accompanied each other perfectly.