271 Quotes by Viet Thanh Nguyen

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.

This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.

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

A person’s strength was always his weakness, and vice versa. The weakness was there to be seen if one could see it.

And yet at Yan’an, Mao said that art and literature were crucial to revolution. Conversely, he warned, art and literature could also be tools of domination. Art.

Quoting Nguyen Du – Talent and destiny are apt to feud.

Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.

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