Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

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.

Movies were America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.

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.

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.

In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.

A person's strength was always his weakness, and vice versa.

Isn't that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear? Keep that in mind.

I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

nothing is more precious than independence and freedom...

The unseen is almost always underlined with the unsaid.

The dead move on, but the living, we just stay here.

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.

no one asks poor people if they want war.

That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he'd feel the exact same thing.

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.

Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many "super" terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?

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.

Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.

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.

What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.

The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.

That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.

We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit.