Top 200 Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The beer had the color and taste of baby’s pee, but we followed our usual routine and drank with joyless discipline until we both passed out.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

152. “Even secret armies and political fronts needed clerks.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

153. “Telling what must not be told is one of the writer’s primary tasks. It is also a difficult and dangerous one.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

154. “So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

155. “I was not a bastard, I was not a bastard, I was not, I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I was.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

156. “Really ingenious, he said. He had a Minnesotan’s admiration for resourcefulness in the face of hardship, bred by generations of people one very bad winter away from starvation and cannibalism. I.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

157. “The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

158. “No wonder, then, that I was drawn to the General, who, like my friends Man and Bon, never sneered about my muddled heritage. Upon selecting me for his staff, the General said, The only thing I’m interested in is how good you are at what you do, even if the things I ask you to do may not be so good. I.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

159. “Every paranoid person is right at least once, said the tall sergeant. When he dies.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

160. “Don’t you see that the Americans need the anti-American?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

161. “I had seen Star Wars a dozen times on video tape, and if anyone was so deprived as to have not watched it even once, then the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

162. “They lived in this fashion for most of the year before the credit line of her patience finally reached its limit.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

163. “But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

164. “Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres’s someone who feels much worse.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

165. “Despite the chronic shortages of almost every good and commodity, there was no shortage of paper, since everyone in the neighborhood was required to write confessions on a periodic basis. Even.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

166. “But what does one say to a ghost, except to ask why he was here? I was afraid of the answer, so instead I said, ‘What took you so long?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

167. “Revolutionaries are insomniacs, too afraid of history’s nightmare to sleep, too troubled by the world’s ills to be less than awake.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

168. “Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. 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.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

169. “No one has ever told you anything that would stop you, not from doing something you wanted.” “That’s because everything I’ve ever done I believed in.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

171. “That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

172. “Disarming an idealist was easy.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

173. “During our visits, he consumed an embarrassingly varied assortment of cheap beer and wine, vacillating between fury and melancholy as one might imagine Richard Nixon to be doing not far away. Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

174. “Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

175. “This was what few people realize – it’s hard work to beat somebody. I have known many an interrogator who has strained a back, pulled a muscle, torn a tendon or a ligament, even broken fingers, toes, hands, and feet, not to mention going hoarse.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

176. “Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

177. “Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

178. “I was the kind bothered less by sinning than by unoriginality.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

179. “One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

180. “All sorts of situations exist where one tells lies in order to reach an acceptable truth, and our conversation continued thus until we agreed on the mutually acceptable sum of ten thousand dollars, which, if being only half what I asked for, was twice their original offer. After the representative wrote a new check, I signed the documents and we traded farewell pleasantries that were worth as little as the trading cards of unknown baseball players.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

181. “I wanted to wrap her in my arms and brush my eyelashes against hers in butterfly kisses.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

182. “This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

183. “Time howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wristwatches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

184. “Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

185. “I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

186. “My task was to ensure that the people scuttling in the background of the film would be real Vietnamese things and dressed in real Vietnamese clothing, right before they died.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

187. “The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don’t you see that’s how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

188. “I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

189. “Sadistic military barbers intent on revealing the contours of their skulls for some nefarious phrenological purpose.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

190. “I had succeeded in saving him, but only, as it turned out, from death.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

191. “Noses to the wind, we inhaled a farrago of scents: charcoal and jasmine, rotting fruit and eucalyptus, gasoline and ammonia, a swirling belch from the city’s poorly irrigated gut.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

192. “They were average specimens of national manhood, slim and gaunt with deeply tanned skin from riding in jeeps and on motorcycles.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

193. “That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he’d feel the exact same thing.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

194. “We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in ’54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

195. “Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

196. “Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

197. “While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

198. “With that, the conversation finally exhausted itself, leaving us to nuzzle our cocktails with the affection one reserved for puppies.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

199. “This feat I also had no idea how to accomplish, but ignorance had never stopped me from taking action before.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

200. “It wouldn’t do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen