Quynh Nguyen Quotes

#1. I had to stop periodically to savor not only my soup but the marrow of my memories. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#2. Don't you see that Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also better to be hated than ignored. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#3. I could live without television, but not without books. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#4. I doubled back to school and overheard Mrs. Andersen in the classroom talking to another teacher. "Can you believe it?" she was saying. "A foreigner winning our spelling bee! #Quote by Bich Minh Nguyen

#5. We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#6. Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life. Fear the media far more, for they will destroy your honour. #Quote by Vo Nguyen Giap

#7. As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right , a dilemma none of us who wanted participate in history could escape. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#8. I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#9. Donated by Japan, cherry blossoms grace the paths where a wall once stood in Berlin. Walls divide. Flowers unite. #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#10. I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air? #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#11. I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#12. Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#13. Those are excellent odds, as the chances of one ultimately dying are one hundred percent. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#14. If you wait for the weekend to live,
you're not living 71% of your life. #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#15. The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men. #Quote by Nguyen Van Thieu

#16. Your problem isn't that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you're thinking. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#17. Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#18. An undaunted author, is the one who will succeed. There is no misfortune, that can dim their optimism. #Quote by Mary Sage Nguyen

#19. Any meeting with Martian command is going to have to wait until after the situation on Ganymede is stabilized. Official diplomatic talks before then are only going to make it seem like we've accepted the new status quo. That was Admiral Nguyen, youngest of the men present. Hawkish. Impressed with himself in the way that successful young men tended to be. General #Quote by James S.A. Corey

#20. I don't want to write about real things, I would rather write about an uncontrollable parasitic twin. #Quote by Mary Sage Nguyen

#21. She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#22. 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? #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#23. 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 #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#24. After the 1954 Geneva international conference, Vietnam was divided into two parts. On paper, North and South Vietnam were twin countries born at the same moment. #Quote by Nguyen Cao Ky

#25. There are more of you and he than you can probably imagine, but most are ashamed and seek to disappear in the foliage of American life. But your numbers are growing, and democracy gives you the best chance of finding your voice. Here you can learn how not to be torn apart by your opposing sides, but rather to balance them and benefit from both. Reconcile your divided allegiances and you will be the ideal translator between two sides, a goodwill ambassador to bring opposing nations to peace! #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#26. If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep? #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#27. in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#28. Nguyen was a war hawk. The kind of adolescent boy who still thought any problem could be solved by shooting it enough. #Quote by James S.A. Corey

#29. 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. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#30. Thomas Edison found 10000 ways in which a lightbulb doesn't work.
Find 10000 ways in which your dream doesn't work. #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#31. Peppering your relationship with a dash of mystery can make it far more palatable. #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#32. Instead of relishing life, people merely existed. Such was the case with my family. #Quote by Kien Nguyen

#33. A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won't even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atom, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war. (178) #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#34. The greatest disability is the inability to take advantage of your abilities. #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#35. As he left room 817, Nguyen turned for one final look before he allowed the soldiers to enter and remove the body. Nguyen thought that the American looked almost serene, lying there, his face bathed in the first rays of the sunlight of a new day, the sound of his laughter still suspended like dandelion seeds in the air nearby, resonating in harmony with that of a former enemy's. #Quote by Steve Earle

#36. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return? #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#37. We only invented the word organic because we made things inorganic.
We only invented the word natural because we made things unnatural.
We only invented the word permaculture because we made agriculture. #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#38. 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. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#39. In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#40. ...being of the firm belief that money did not lie until it was spent, particularly in the company of friends #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen

#41. Everyone is always leaving each other, chasing down the next seeming opportunity - home or body. Where does it stop? Does it ever? I want to believe it all leads to something grander than the imagination, grander than the end-stop of the Pacific. Or is that it: You get to the place where you land; you are tired now; you settle. You settle. You build a home and raise a family. There are years of eating and arguing, working and waking. There are years of dying. No one knows what the last image will be. #Quote by Bich Minh Nguyen

#42. Behold
the azure sea in front of you,
the turquoise sky above you,
the amber mountain beneath your feet,
and the golden daisy in your hands.
How are you not the richest person on earth? #Quote by Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#43. 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. #Quote by Viet Thanh Nguyen