The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized.” (The Committed Quotes)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Books mean something different when return to them later, leavened with age.” “Books meant something different when we returned to them later, leavened by life.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Human beings can make: an excuse. Whoever said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions had gotten it all wrong. If you looked more closely, you could see that the road to Hell was paved with excuses.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“I was a little person who spoke an immigrant version of his language, the language of a country that basked in the best of both worlds: to have once been an imperial power that had mugged weaker countries at gunpoint, while no longer being an imperial power and having to deal with pesky things like mosquitoes and malaria or resentment and revolutions.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“If I’m unreadable—if all these Asians you refer to are unreadable—perhaps we are only unreadable to those who do not know how to read.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover – our own.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Real talent was required to use so many words in two languages to say nothing.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Seeing the failures of both comunism and anticomunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand. You may think that I’m being a nihilist, but you could not be more wrong. While nihilists thought life was meaningless and rejected all religious and moral principles, I still believed in the principle of revolution. I also believed that nothing was full of meaning – in short, that nothing was actually something. Wasn’t that a kind of revolution in itself?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Such an interesting English expression “dog eat dog”, since dogs don’t really eat dogs (dogs do eat shit, but that’s another story).”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“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.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“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?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one’s own people was always comforting.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was “to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“To avoid talking, we both smoked incessantly and listened to a greatest hits tape of Johnny Hallyday, the sonic equivalent of Ricard Pastis, a taste the rest of the world could not acquire.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“We wanted love, peace, and justice, except for our enemies, whom we wanted to burn in Hell, preferably for eternity.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
“While the northerners offered a utopia that could be found nowhere, the southerners had created a Fantasia that could be experienced everywhere.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed
