Top 80 Nghi Vo Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves. I am not worried for her in the least.”

— Nghi Vo

2. “When I looked at Michel de Winter, old god that he was, I could see the worship in his eyes, a kind of helpless love that didn’t even want to help itself. To see her was to love her, and a wanting rose up in me like an ache. I wanted someone to look at me like that; I wanted to change the world simply because I could.”

— Nghi Vo

3. “There was a heat to her that put the day to shame, as if she were burning up with fever from within.”

— Nghi Vo

4. “When you love a thing too much, it is a special kind of pain to show it to others and to see that it is lacking.”

— Nghi Vo

5. “I know very well, though, that In-yo never hated Kao-fan. She may have pitied her, or been angry with her, or simply found her irritating or foolish or unfashionable. Hate, however, was reserved for equals, and as far as In-yo was concerned, she had no equals in all the empire.”

— Nghi Vo

6. “For him, as in the hallowed halls of the elite from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, there would always be a human price for his luxury. Otherwise, I could see him musing, what was the point?”

— Nghi Vo

7. “In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.”

— Nghi Vo

8. “We were stories that should never have met, or stories that only existed because we met. I still don’t know.”

— Nghi Vo

9. “My eyes are open for always, my mouth is empty for always, and always will my soul reach for yours. In the land of the dead, there are only blackbirds, and I send this one to you, in the hopes that you remember me still. Light me a stick of incense, and so long as it burns, let me sit in the chamber outside your bedroom again. Until it goes out... Let me stay and be for you.”

— Nghi Vo

10. “She killed, for she was angry, and she did not eat what she killed, for she was heartsick.”

— Nghi Vo

11. “I imagined their lungs were protected in their youth by keeping their mouths shut tight. Then as they grew older themselves, more prone to voice their opinions, more eager to make sure that the world did not go one second longer without their words than it absolutely had to, the ash won over, sliding over their skin and then into their open mouths.”

— Nghi Vo

12. “The night before her wedding, Daisy taught me that after the world ended, you still had to get up in the morning, and the things that you ruined would still be there, needing to be fixed. When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.”

— Nghi Vo

13. “Men had no idea how careless the women of their set weren’t allowed to be.”

— Nghi Vo

14. “I’m not a nice girl at all,” I said with a wink. “I’m better.”

— Nghi Vo

15. “There are women who will forgive a great deal for a moment of kindness from a handsome man, but Daisy and the other older girls who had taken me under their wings had taught me not to be one of them.”

— Nghi Vo

16. “She was known to be kind, which you should never confuse with being gracious or beautiful or courteous.”

— Nghi Vo

17. “He called me careless because he didn’t have the words to sort out how jealous he was of my money and my freedom and how very few people in the world could act as I did.”

— Nghi Vo

18. “I wasn’t good with other girls. I felt strange around them, all competition tangled with a desperate urge to please and belong.”

— Nghi Vo

19. “What a cock the Shaking Earth Master must be if he’s going to sit on his ass in his fortress, refusing to move until he sees a lovely face and a trim pair of legs.”

— Nghi Vo

20. “Let him kill himself,” I said finally. “As long as he is dead, that is all that matters to me.” That’s something I think peasants understand better than nobles. For them, the way down matters, whether you are skewered by a dozen guardsmen or thrown in a silk sack to drown or allowed to remove your robe and walk down to the shores of the lake before you gut yourself. Peasants understand that dead is dead.”

— Nghi Vo

21. “The wind came into the house from the Sound, and it blew Daisy and me around her East Egg mansion like puffs of dandelion seeds, like foam, like a pair of young women in white dresses who had no cares to weigh them down.”

— Nghi Vo

22. “When I explained it to her, she went silent and turned her face to the wall, still as the sky before a lightning strike.”

— Nghi Vo

23. “Under the wrack and wreck of what had come before, the sky was new, and I reached for it with a yearning eager hand.”

— Nghi Vo

24. “See, this combination means that you will be successful in your career, but only if you remember to take things in their own time. No one likes a prodigy, after all. Patience should be your watchword.”

— Nghi Vo

25. “Down among the ashes, their faces and hands turned gray and grimy with the refuse of New York, I could see the men who lived and worked in the ash. It was their lot to shovel the ash that came in. It was a titanic struggle that I imagined they could only cope with by realizing that they were after an impossible goal and therefore were free to ignore it.”

— Nghi Vo

26. “Save that anger,” Mai said with a sigh. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.”

— Nghi Vo

27. “Strange how some trash survives, but precious things are lost, isn’t it?”

— Nghi Vo

28. “What’s your name?” I asked her after making a study of her face for a half dozen years. There was a cragginess to her features, her strong nose and her sharp jaw. It would crash ships rather than launch them, but I never knew a woman who didn’t want to crash at least a few ships.”

— Nghi Vo

29. “History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read.”

— Nghi Vo

30. “Look to your records, cleric. Honor is a light that brings trouble. Shadows are safer by far.”

— Nghi Vo

31. “We don’t have to do anything. We can just wait for fall. Life starts over again in fall.”

— Nghi Vo

32. “I already knew that being brave didn’t mean anything unless you were willing to do it again.”

— Nghi Vo

33. “Death doesn’t come to Gatsby’s” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. Certainly ugliness didn’t, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home?”

— Nghi Vo

34. “It was common tat around New York that an old wizard had made her from a whole garden’s worth of peonies. He should have made her out of something more sturdy, because she was looking wilted under the August heat.”

— Nghi Vo

35. “The abbey at Singing Hills would say that if a record cannot be perfect, it should at least be present. Better for it to exist than for it to be perfect and only in your mind.”

— Nghi Vo

36. “He wanted something agreeable, something sweeter around the edges, but I was never very good at sweet.”

— Nghi Vo

37. “When you’re alone so much, realizing that you’re not is terribly upsetting.”

— Nghi Vo

38. “She smiled sweetly, and took my hand in hers. She smelled faintly of milk and honey and something warmer as well. Later, I realized that she was still very much on painkillers when we were having this conversation. “Of course it is, min skatt. Nothing’s hard but life, eh?”

— Nghi Vo

39. “Hate, however, was reserved for equals.”

— Nghi Vo

40. “It was after midnight with that tired charm that all parties on the downturn acquire.”

— Nghi Vo

41. “He liked being shocked by the extravagances of the city, but he was not ready for the people that came with the wonder, who lived shoulder to shoulder with wonder and thus grew immune to it.”

— Nghi Vo

42. “I wasn’t really interested in making a go of it with anyone, no matter what Tom and Daisy were pushing, but part of that disinterest came from the place of a rather arrogant person realizing that she couldn’t. There was nothing as uninteresting as something I couldn’t have.”

— Nghi Vo

43. “The world is built on who carries what and for who,” Chih said, settling the weight more comfortably on their shoulders. “It’s not a bad world where we carry presents for people who feed us.”

— Nghi Vo

44. “Submission but only to the truth.”

— Nghi Vo

45. “Honor is a light that brings trouble. Shadows are safer by far.”

— Nghi Vo

46. “You are so slow the Huan River could run backwards and the emperor could give the realm to the rule of the people and they could breed a wise horse and an honest lawyer before you landed a blow.”

— Nghi Vo

47. “Chih thought that even from the crowd, they would see in her face the trace of a migratory bird, a rabbit, and the empress from the north, fierce enough to fight wolves.”

— Nghi Vo

48. “She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read.”

— Nghi Vo

49. “Yes,” I sighed. Sometimes, the only excuse for doing something stupid is knowing that you are doing it and being willing to accept the consequences.”

— Nghi Vo

50. “I had never seen a moon like that before. It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.”

— Nghi Vo