Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

This, Arthur realized, was the difference between them. Arthur thought of what he had done, what he was doing, or what he should have done, but Louis thought only of what he would do. For

because happiness, American style, is a zero-sum game,

And I was thankful, truly! But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.

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. She would read out loud, from the beginning. She would read with measured breath, to the very end. She would read as if every letter counted, page by page and word by word.

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?

the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.

human beings can make: an excuse. Whoever said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions had gotten it all wrong. If you looked more closely, you could see that the road to Hell was paved with excuses.

At a time in which the demand for productivity and the measuring of outputs has increased in the university—indeed, everywhere—it is important to acknowledge how much of what is crucial in the work that matters to us, no matter what our field, can neither be quantified nor accelerated.

someone who sells

Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere.

But the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do, I went on, is to actually do the right thing.

It was Didion crossed with Chandler as prophesied by Faulkner and shot by Welles.

Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can't have both.

They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can't have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. 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.

Like the homeless, refugees are living embodiments of a disturbing possibility: that human privileges are quite fragile, that one's home, family, and nation are one catastrophe away from being destroyed.

I've tried love," Louis said, as if it were a kind of soft, malodorous French cheese.

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better?

It was, instead, the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.

This was the silence my father encountered every day during his prayers, the silence that hundreds of millions heard every day as they beseeched God to say something, anything. He always said nothing, which hardly disabused His legions of fans. For someone who never said anything, God certainly spoke to a lot of people.

He was a relatively innocent man, which was the best one could hope for in this world.

The average American, or European, who feels that refugees or immigrants threaten their jobs does not recognize that the real culprits for their economic plight are the corporate interests and individuals that want to take the profits and are perfectly happy to see the struggling pitted against each other.

It was a little past nine o'clock when I checked my watch at the entrance to his apartment building, a gray two-story factory for manufacturing hundreds of tired replicas of the American Dream. All the inmates imagined their dreams to be unique, but they were merely tin reproductions of a lost original.

Writing was entering into fog, feeling my way for a route from this world to the unearthly world of words, a route easier to find on some day that others. Lurking on my shoulder as I stumbled was the parrot of a question, asking me how I lived and he died.

Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" I asked. Over the line, in the silence, the static hissed. "You aren't afraid of the things you believe in," he said. This, too, I wrote in his memoir, even though I had not understood what he meant.