Top 200 Viet Thanh Nguyen Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The spectacle of the constabulary in the terminal with automatic weapons slung on their shoulders also made me homesick, confirming I was again in a country with its malnourished neck under a dictator’s loafer.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

202. “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

203. “He winced. I had hit him where it hurt, in the solar plexus of his conscience, where everyone who was an idealist was vulnerable. Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen. The question was one of commitment.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

204. “I laughed, even though inside me the little dog of my soul was sitting at attention, nose and ears to the wind.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

205. “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

206. “Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

207. “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

208. “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

209. “The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

210. “As some men were born to handle a paintbrush or a pen, he was born to wield a gun. It looked natural in his hand, a tool of which a man could be proud, like a wrench.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

211. “I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

212. “I pitied the French for their naivete in believing that they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur’s imaginations and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

213. “One did not depend on marines for good table manners. One depended on them to have the right instincts when it came to matters of life and death.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

214. “Always a shy one, he swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

216. “But, like superheroes, they would not want to keep themselves a secret for long. How could you be a superhero if no one knew you existed?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

217. “For example, grown men who sneer at the idea of unicorns will tearfully testify to the existence of an even rarer, more mythical species. Found only in remote ports of call and the darkest, deepest reaches of the most insalubrious taverns, this is the prostitute in whose chest beats the proverbial heart of gold. Let me assure you, if there is one part of a prostitute that is made of gold, it is not her heart.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

218. “But after the bottle was empty sometime that night, I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. Now.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

219. “I had to stop periodically to savor not only my soup but the marrow of my memories.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

220. “If I remember correctly, pages 26, 42, 58, 77, 91, 103 and 118, basically all the places in the script where one of my people has a speaking part, he or she screams. No words, just screams. So you should at least get the screams right.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

221. “My... principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello;... do not let her speak first... give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me... statements, not questions, were less likely to lead to no.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

222. “Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

223. “The more logical conclusion was that the General had bolstered the Vietnamese tendency for conspiracy with the American trait of paranoia, admittedly with my help.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

224. “Why were we hungry? my stomach cried. Even then I understood that if the rich could only spare all the hungry a bowl of rice, they would be less rich but they would not starve. If the solution was so simple, why was anyone hungry? Was it only a lack of sympathy?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

225. “Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician... had to keep his lips constantly moving.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

226. “I am a sleeper, a spy, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not a misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, though some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

227. “He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

228. “For we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It’s as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

229. “Forgive me. I’m talking politics again. I swear not to talk about politics tonight, my brother. You know how hard that is for someone who believes everything is political.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

230. “But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

231. “One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

232. “I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

233. “The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

234. “Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

235. “The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep sea-diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

236. “He had hung an elaborate Oriental rug on his wall, in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

237. “Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

238. “Revolutions begin this way, with men willing to fight no matter what the odds, volunteering to give up everything because they had nothing.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

239. “I admit to not being an aficionado of children, having been one and having found my cohort and myself generally despicable. 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

240. “Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

241. “You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness – how unforgivable!”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen