Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

More than all those people starved by famine, it was the thought of my mother not remembering what she looked like as a little girl that saddened me.

He winced. I had hit him where it hurt, in the solar plexus of his conscience, where everyone who was an idealist was vulnerable. 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.

Despair may be thick, but friendship's thicker.

I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. 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

What is valuable about my worlds of the arts and humanities is that they create spaces for this type of slow thinking. And by this I mean that we value the arts and humanities not simply for the material possibilities and rewards they may bring, like a Pulitzer Prize. Rather, we should value the arts and humanities for their privileging of the mystery and intuition that makes moments of revelation and innovation possible.

The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one's own people was always comforting.

nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else's freedom and independence.

was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. 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.

Can you love someone you don't remember? Can you love someone you don't know?

I want to travel anywhere I want, anytime I want. I want to come back here and know I can leave.

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it's been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians.

I am a refugee, an American, and a human being, which is important to proclaim, as there are many who think these identities cannot be reconciled.

These men were better than any real brothers I could have had, for we had chosen each other.

Don't you get it? They've got no intention of coming back. They know it's a suicide mission. Life's a suicide mission.

There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.

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. They take advantage of things...and they don't question things. As long as those things work for them, then they support those things. But you see the lie beneath those things because you never got to take part.

consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.

Good-bye, America, the grizzled captain said during our ascent, looking out the window at a landscape I could not see from my aisle seat. I've had enough of you, he said. The affectless lieutenant, sitting in the middle, agreed. Why did we ever call it the beautiful country? he said. I had no answer.

I think of the novelist Haruki Murakami, who compares writing a novel to digging a hole through deep rock to reach a source of water.

Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission.

Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that's where revolutions start!

The General, who hardly ever raised his voice, now did. Unofficially, you are abandoning us, he shouted. All day and night planes depart from the airport. Everyone who works with Americans wants an exit visa. They go to your embassy for these visas. You have evacuated your own women. You have evacuated babies and orphans. Why is it that the only people who do not know the Americans are pulling out are the Americans?

WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT WHAT NEEDS DOING?

But for all we thought we knew about them, there were some things we knew we did not know even after many years of forced and voluntary intimacy, including the art of making cranberry sauce, the proper way of throwing a football, and the secret customs of secret societies, like college fraternities, which seemed to recruit only those who would have been eligible for the Hitler Youth. Not