271 Quotes by Viet Thanh Nguyen

For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile.

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

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.

There is always something. That is confession’s nature.

Che Guevera and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it close up, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier for the living! But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own.

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?

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.

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

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.