Viet Thanh Nguyen

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“lmost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere.”

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

“give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me”

“He responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only was my fly undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was.”

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

“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?”

“Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud.”

“no one asks poor people if they want war.”

“cheered by the optimism that one sometimes had at the beginning of strenuous exercise, a kind of helium that filled our lungs and carried us along”

“No one asks poor people if they want war. Nor had anyone asked these poor people if they wanted to die of thirst and exposure on the coastal sea, or if they wanted to be robbed and raped by their own soldiers.”

“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.”

“...nothing is more precious than independence and freedom...”

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

“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.”