Xine Viet Quotes

Ever since the first caveman discovered fire and decided that the ones still living in darkness were benighted, it's been civilization against barbarism . . . with every age having its own barbarians. Nothing ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both. At ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

The American soldiers were brave, but courage is not enough. David did not kill Goliath just because he was brave. He looked up at Goliath and realized that if he fought Goliath's way with a sword, Goliath would kill him. But if he picked up a rock and put it in his sling, he could hit Goliath in the head and knock Goliath down and kill him. David used his mind when he fought Goliath. So did we Vietnamese when we had to fight the Americans. ~ Vo Nguyen Giap

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

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything. That means you can't change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

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. It ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Refugees such as ourselves could never dare question the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth. But Dr. Hedd was beyond reproach, for he was an English immigrant. His very existence as such validated the legitimacy of the former colonies, while his heritage and accent triggered the latent Anglophilia and inferiority complex found in many Americans. Dr. Hedd was clearly aware of his privilege and was amused at the discomfort he was causing his American hosts. It ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

Oh, fish sauce! How we missed it, dear Aunt, how nothing tasted right without it, how we longed for the grand cru of Phu Quoc Island and its vats brimming with the finest vintage of pressed anchovies! This pungent liquid condiment of the darkest sepia hue was much denigrated by foreigners for its supposedly horrendous reek, lending new meaning to the phrase "there's something fishy aroud here," for we were the fishy ones. We used fish sauce the way Transylvanian villagers were cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, in our case to establish a perimeter with those Westerners who could never understand that was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. What was fermented fish compared to curdled milk? ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

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

My idea was that the role of the special forces were to train Vietnamese to behave as guerrillas, harassing the supply lines down through the mountains of the, ah, the Viet Cong. And the special American special forces were to train their special forces to do that. ~ Roger Hilsman

I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

With that, the conversation finally exhausted itself, leaving us to nuzzle our cocktails with the affection one reserved for puppies. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts... and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody's apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant garde theatre and Viet Nam. ~ David Lodge

Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

All of us who are living are dying. The only ones not dying are the dead.,,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

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

First our comrades. They come from many places. Some were good Jews fighting the baddy Arabs, some were baddy Jews fighting the goody Arabs, some were good protestants fighting the baddy catholics, some were baddy protestants fighting the goody catholics, some were goody or baddy, Viet Cong, black or white, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. ~ Nicholas Emmett

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

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

So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

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

Napoleon said men will die for bits of ribbon pinned to their chests, but the General understands that even more men will die for a man who remembered their names, as he does theirs. When he inspects them, he walks among them, eats with them, calls them by their names and asks about wives, children, girlfriends, hometowns. All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered. Neither is possible without the other. This desire drives these busboys, waiters, janitors, gardeners, mechanics, night guards, and welfare beneficiaries to save enough money to buy themselves uniforms, boots, and guns, to want to be men again. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Today's theater-goer must live in dread of walking into a theater and discovering that some classic work has been given a modernized, socially relevant setting. Oedipus gouges his eyes with a spoon at a 1950's malt shop; Macbeth napalms Banquo in Viet Nam, Julius Caesar dies in Dallas in 1963. More and more, American theater is coming to resemble a season of Quantum Leap. ~ Reduced Shakespeare Company

The article I actually write is a masterpiece. It takes talent to convince people that war is a beautiful experience. Come one, come all to exotic Viet Nam, the jewel of Southeast Asia, meet interesting, stimulating people of an ancient culture...and kill them. Be the first kid on your block to get a confirmed kill. ~ Gustav Hasford

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. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. 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

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth. ~ Daniel Keys Moran

Hillary Clinton will travel to Vietnam with the president this Friday. It's a fact that at the height of the war in 1971, she tried to enlist in the Marines, but they turned her down. Apparently we weren't that mad at the Viet Cong. ~ Argus Hamilton

This is what I think so many of us who work in the arts and the humanities hope to receive from our universities, from our government, from sometimes skeptical students and their parents: patience and faith in us as we test the limits of our ignorance, as we pursue what may very well be useless, as we go in search of that mystery and intuition that exist within all of us. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

It became very clear that Hanoi was in effect strategically running the Viet Cong operation. ~ William Westmoreland

Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen