Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.

We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.

With that, the conversation finally exhausted itself, leaving us to nuzzle our cocktails with the affection one reserved for puppies.

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.

Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think.

His habit of forgetting was too deeply ingrained, as if he passed his life perpetually walking backward through a desert, sweeping away his footprints,

But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful.

These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.

the only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do...is to actually do the right thing.

Sometime after our third round, Ms. Mori cupped her chin with her right hand, elbow on the bar, and allowed me to light her cigarette, which, in my opinion, was one of the most erotic acts of foreplay a man can perform for a woman.

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.

I quietly quaffed my cognac, discreetly admiring Lana's legs. Longer than the Bible and a hell of a lot more fun, they stretched forever, like an Indian yogi or an American highway shimmering through the Great Plains or the southwestern desert. Her legs demanded to be looked at and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer.

Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death.

So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall.

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. Although

we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything. That means you can't change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.

Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live.

I confess that I admired him, even though he was my enemy. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.