Quotes About Legacy

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.

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

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.

When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie.

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one's father was born and where one's father was buried. My father's father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh's birthplace.

To understand our fate and theirs, we must do more than tell ghost stories. We must also tell the war stories that made ghosts and made us ghosts, the war stories that brought us here.

Saigon had also changed names after it changed hands, but they couldn't bring themselves to call it Ho Chi Mind City. Neither could the taxi driver who ferried them from their hotel to the house, even though he was too young to remember a time when the city was officially Saigon.

Memory and self-representation are thus inseparable, for those who represent themselves are also saying this: remember us.

This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget. When

It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Any

Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?

All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered.

To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one's own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.

The Movie was just a sequel to our war and a prequel to the next one that America was destined to wage.

Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom—I was so tired of saying these words!—we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same.

They send him away and no one ever sees him again. That's what happens to writers who put their names on things.

Unheralded we came into this world. Unheralded we will go out. But while we are in this world, we do such deeds that even if this generation does not remember, the next generation cannot forget.

What would I do with all that wealth? Eventually a man just needs six feet of cloth for his shroud.

Maybe this was why people had kids, so that when you could no longer travel with your parents, your children made all train trips new again.

Accept Christianity? Go to eternal rest and life? No. I die. But my life lives on.

How rarely these few years, as work keeps up aloof, Or fares, or one thing or another, How we had days to spend under our parents' roof; Myself, my sister, and my brother. All five of us will die; to reckon from the past This flesh and blood is unforgiving. What's hard is that just one of us will be the last To bear it all and go on living.