Top 200 Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

53. “You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

54. “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

55. “Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

56. “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

57. “Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

58. “Sometime after our third round, Ms. Mori cupped her chin with her right hand, elbow on the bar, and allowed me to light her cigarette, which, in my opinion, was one of the most erotic acts of foreplay a man can perform for a woman.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

60. “We were not a people who charged into war at the beck and call of bugle or trumpet. No, we fought to the tunes of love songs, for we were the Italians of Asia.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

61. “In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

63. “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

64. “Don’t you see that Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also better to be hated than ignored.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

65. “Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

66. “Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

67. “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.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

68. “Ignorance is beneficial when we are aware of it.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

69. “I confess that I admired him, even though he was my enemy. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

70. “The reason for such behavior, her father said, was that the foreign tourists knew only one thing about this country, the war.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

71. “America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

72. “I do not remember many things, and for all those things I do not remember, I am grateful, because the things I do remember hurt me enough.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

73. “She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

74. “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. Her legs demanded to be looked at and would not take no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe for an answer.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

75. “Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that’s where revolutions start! And it’s the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us. That’s what happened when I met Sofia. I saw myself the way she saw me.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

76. “What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

77. “I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

78. “These questions required either Camus or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

79. “Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

80. “Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

81. “I’m forty-six years old and I don’t care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she’s wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

82. “Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

83. “By now the only part of me now seating were my eyeballs.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

84. “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. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

85. “The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

86. “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.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

87. “Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term, but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

88. “One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

89. “We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

90. “She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

91. “Although he could have shot me or turned us back, he did what I gambled every honorable man forced to take a bribe would do. He let us all pass, holding up his end of the bargain as the last fig leaf of his dignity. I averted my eyes from his humiliation.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

92. “No more than two opinions or ideas on any one issue should be out there, the General said. Look at the voting system. Same concept. We had multiple parties and candidates and look at the mess we had. Here you choose the left hand or the right and that’s more than enough. Two choices and look at all the drama with every presidential election. Even two choices may be one too many. One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

93. “I naively believed that I could divert the Hollywood organism from its goal, the simultaneous lobotomization and pickpocketing of the world’s audiences. The ancillary benefit was strip-mining history, leaving the real history in the tunnels along with the dead, doling out tiny sparkling diamonds for audiences to gasp over.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

94. “I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

95. “I sipped my scotch. It was smoky and smooth, tasting of peat and aged oak, underscored by licorice and the intangible essence of Scottish masculinity. I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

96. “In short, I was in a familiar place, the place of feeling unfamiliar, which I responded to in my usual fashion by arming myself with a gin and tonic, my first of the evening. I.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

97. “For a long time I felt bad. I wondered why I didn’t want to learn Japanese, why I didn’t already speak Japanese, why I would rather go to Paris or Istanbul or Barcelona rather than Tokyo. But then I thought, Who cares? Did anyone ask John F. Kennedy if he spoke Gaelic and visited Dublin or if he ate potatoes every night or if he collected paintings of leprechauns? So why are we supposed to not forget our culture? Isn’t my culture right here since I was born here?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

98. “You’re too sympathetic, the General said. You didn’t see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you’ve been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

99. “I could live without television, but not without books.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

100. “Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen