Quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen

breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty.

All sorts of situations exist where one tells lies in order to reach an acceptable truth, and our conversation continued thus until we agreed on the mutually acceptable sum of ten thousand dollars, which, if being only half what I asked for, was twice their original offer. After the representative wrote a new check, I signed the documents and we traded farewell pleasantries that were worth as little as the trading cards of unknown baseball players.

This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and

Easier to get a gun here than to vote or drive. You

One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both.

Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?

A slogan is just an empty suit, she said. Anyone can wear it.

We're all the same to them, Phuong understood with a mix of anger and shame—small, charming, and forgettable. She

Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it. I

We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. No,

I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.

She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.

I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air?

Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle.

I wanted to wrap her in my arms and brush my eyelashes against hers in butterfly kisses.

I need not look in the mirror or at the faces of my fellow men to find a likeness to God. I need only look at their selves and inside my own to realize we would not be killers if God Himself was not one, too.

You're too sympathetic, the General said. You didn't see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you've been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent.

Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We're all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn't that what Original Sin is all about?

Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?

Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We

I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.

Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent.

For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It's as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.