Quotes About Memory

We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.

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

I had to stop periodically to savor not only my soup but the marrow of my memories.

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.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WROTE THAT "if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.

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.

Lana was not above socializing with a common man, and for the next hour they became partners on a walk down memory lane, reminiscing about Saigon and songs while 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.

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

All of us who are living are dying. The only ones not dying are the dead. 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.

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?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

B]ooks mean something different when return to them later, leavened with age.

Bang bang was the sound of memory's pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon.

All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered.

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. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?

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.

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

Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

Can you love someone you don't remember? Can you love someone you don't know?

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.