Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

They lived in this fashion for most of the year before the credit line of her patience finally reached its limit.

Despite the chronic shortages of almost every good and commodity, there was no shortage of paper, since everyone in the neighborhood was required to write confessions on a periodic basis. Even

The reason for such behavior, her father said, was that the foreign tourists knew only one thing about this country, the war.

There is always something. That is confession's nature.

Disarming an idealist was easy

If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God.

This was what few people realize—it's hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse.

Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud.

Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously.

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.

Let's just hope history forgets the snafus.

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie.

I had seen Star Wars a dozen times on video tape, and if anyone was so deprived as to have not watched it even once, then the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution.

These displaced persons are mostly unwanted where they fled from; unwanted where they are, in refugee camps; and unwanted where they want to go.

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.

blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After

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! And it's the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us. That's what happened when I met Sofia. I saw myself the way she saw me.

For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile.

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

Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other.

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

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. Nothing

No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers.

the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.