Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

Their tender eyes were no longer exposed daily to stories and pictures of atrocity and terror for which they might have felt responsible, given that they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.

If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?...Let me propose that truth, or some measure of it, can be found in these youthful follies that we forget, to our loss, as adults.

Resentment was an antidote to gloominess, as it was for sadness, melancholy, despair, etc.

Real talent was required to use so many words in two languages to say nothing.

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.

Except for him, most of our fellow exiles had been shrunken by their experience, either absolutely through the aforementioned maladies of migration, or relatively, surrounded by Americans so tall they neither looked through nor looked down on these newcomers. They simply looked over them.

Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming ever 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. But

I breakfasted with the crapulent major a week later. It was an earthy, quotidian scene, the kind Walt Whitman would have loved to write about, a sketch of the new America featuring hot rice porridge and fried crullers at a Monterey Park noodle shop crammed full of unrepentantly unassimilated Chinese and a few other assorted Asians.

I'd remember to take care of your soul.

the word of Sartre, writing on Fanon, is: "With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation." Or to put it in my own words: Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonization was the only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.

If Jesus Christ, child of refugees, born poor in a stable, a colonized person, a hick from the backwaters, despised by his society's leaders and by the rulers of his leaders, a humble carpenter—if this Jesus Christ became universal—then so can I, motherfucker!

Thousands more must be staring into darkness like us, gripped by scandalous thoughts, extravagant hopes, and forbidden plots. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.

I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess.

The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.

Strong and healthy, that's what these twins will be. They'll need to be. This country isn't for the weak or the fat.

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven't lived through one yet.

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

Imagine always having to live with a hyphen dividing you!

It was an act of faith, and faith would not be faith if it was not hard, if it was not a test, if it was not an act of willful ignorance, of believing in something that can neither be predicted nor proved by any scientific metric.

was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. 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.

No matter whether my eyes were open or shut, I could still see it, the crapulent major's third eye, weeping because of what it could see about me.

Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn't my culture right here since I was born here?

We wanted love, peace, and justice, except for our enemies, whom we wanted to burn in Hell, preferably for eternity.