Top 80 Nghi Vo Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo

4. “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

5. “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

6. “I spared him the trouble of coming up with a reason to talk to me, instead plucking the drink from his hand. It was a bijou, vermouth and gin flavored with absinthe; a strange choice for Nick if it was a choice he had made at all.”

— Nghi Vo

7. “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

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

— Nghi Vo

9. “You left too soon, and that is unfair, but we are not the ones who sped you on your way. Forgive us what we did, and do not follow us when we go.”

— Nghi Vo

10. “The party was winding down into a graceless mess, something that had always irritated me. People are at their worst in transition, moving from one life to another. All of Gatsby’s beautiful people were being revealed for the sloppy, irritable, wayward, and human creatures they really were.”

— Nghi Vo

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Nghi Vo

15. “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

16. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.”

— Nghi Vo

17. “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

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

— Nghi Vo

19. “Aunt Justine once gave me some advice when I was newly come to New York. If I was going to be passing anything more than time in public with a man, I should always find out what happened when he heard no, whether it was from me, a taxi driver, a waiter, or his employer. “You may decide what to do after that,” she said, “but most times, your course of action will be clear.”

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo

21. “They were Dieu’s favorite lines, and she was almost afraid to look up to see how the tiger took them. 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

22. “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

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. “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

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo

31. “Someone had tied her big toes together with string, a tradition in the East to keep a corpse from walking.”

— Nghi Vo

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Nghi Vo

36. “Ugly women, beautiful women, what foolishness. Most of us are lucky if we’re born with a measure of common sense in our heads.”

— Nghi Vo

37. “I’m curious, though, and my father said that if I could be curious instead of afraid, things would probably work out some kind of right.”

— Nghi Vo

38. “I am yours, and so I will be your light and your laughter. I am yours, so open your eyes to look at me, and open your mouth so that I may kiss it. I am yours, I am yours, and nevermore will I leave.”

— Nghi Vo

39. “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

40. “And so you came to my house on the soft pads of a midwinter kitten, the whisper of your black tresses sweeping your heels, and so you came to my heart just as quietly. Why, then, did you make such a terrible noise when you let go of my hand and departed, a great trumpeting of horns, a great beating of drums?”

— Nghi Vo

41. “Did you keep it?” I asked. I wouldn’t have been so sanguine about taking gifts from someone like Gatsby, but she gave me an indignant look. Things were different where she came from, apparently, or perhaps she wasn’t so very bright. “Two hundred and sixty-five dollars, gas blue with lavender beads? Of course I did!”

— Nghi Vo

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

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

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo

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

— Nghi Vo