Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

El coñac lo mejoraba todo, era el equivalente para los adultos de un beso de tu madre,…».

I'm forty-six years old and I don't care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she's wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack.

in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily

Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.

How do you know you've made a great work of art? A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won't even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atoms, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war.

Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician... had to keep his lips constantly moving.

What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac.

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.

Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn't intend for us to be slaves to each other.

With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn't matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you're floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.

I do not remember many things, and for all those things I do not remember, I am grateful, because the things I do remember hurt me enough.

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and I was right to kill him. Wasn't I?

Not for the first time, I longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for.

But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!

One did not depend on marines for good table manners. One depended on them to have the right instincts when it came to matters of life and death.

people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed

Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies.

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise. In any case, you can't blame a gay for trying, he said, smiling a smile utterly unlike my own.

Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.

Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. 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.

We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.

After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. But

As the crapulent major said, A man doesn't need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.