Top 200 Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

2. “Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

3. “These displaced persons are mostly unwanted where they fled from; unwanted where they are, in refugee camps; and unwanted where they want to go.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

4. “A person’s strength was always his weakness, and vice versa. The weakness was there to be seen if one could see it.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

5. “If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

6. “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?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

7. “While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

8. “This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

10. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

11. “Not for the first time, I longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

12. “Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

13. “It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. James Fenton, “A German Requiem.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

14. “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?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

15. “Are you going to be the kind of person who always pays the asking price?” my mother demanded. “Or the kind who fights to find out what something’s really worth?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

16. “It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

17. “Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

18. “They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

19. “A person’s strength was always his weakness, and vice versa.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

20. “We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

21. “Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

22. “The unseen is almost always underlined with the unsaid.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

23. “Always resent, never relent.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

24. “As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted participate in history could escape.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

25. “You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

26. “The dead move on, but the living, we just stay here.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

27. “Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

28. “Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

29. “Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

30. “I am a bad refugee because I insist on seeing the historical reasons that create refugees and the historical reasons for denying refugee status to certain populations.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

31. “We’re all the same to them, Phuong understood with a mix of anger and shame – small, charming, and forgettable. She.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

32. “We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

33. “Readers and writers should not deceive themselves that literature changes the world. Literature changes the world of readers and writers, but literature does not change the world until people get out of their chairs, go out in the world, and do something to transform the conditions of which the literature speaks.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

34. “I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

35. “As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and I was right to kill him. Wasn’t I?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

36. “For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

37. “I came to understand that in the United States, land of the fabled American dream, it is un-American to be a refugee. The refugee embodies fear, failure, and flight. Americans of all kinds believe that it is impossible for an American to become a refugee, although it is possible for refugees to become Americans and in that way be elevated one step closer to heaven.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

38. “My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

39. “As the crapulent major said, A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

40. “Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

41. “Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

42. “I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

43. “No, just as my abused generation was divided before birth, so was I divided on birth, delivered into a postpartum world where hardly anyone accepted me for who I was, but only ever bullied me into choosing between my two sides. This was not simply hard to do no, it was truly impossible, for how I choose me againse myself?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

44. “I was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness – that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

45. “If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

46. “With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn’t matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you’re floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

47. “Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word. At least that’s one way I’ve figured out hot to describe love.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

48. “You wouldn’t know right from wrong.” There was no trace of anger in his voice. “The only way a man knows right from wrong is when he makes a choice.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

49. “The immigrant is the one who wants to come, unlike the refugee, who is forced to come.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

50. “After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen