The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real.” (The Sympathizer Quotes)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“A guarantee of happiness – that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“A person’s strength was always his weakness, and vice versa.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“A spy’s task is not to hide himself where no one can see him, since he will not be able to see anything himself. A spy’s task is to hide where everyone can see him and where he can see everything.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“A talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you – that is a hazard, I must confess.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, especially as they screwed them from behind.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“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.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Authors were, at heart, no matter how much they blustered or how suavely they carried themselves, insecure creatures with sensitive egos, as delicate in the constitution as movie stars, only much poorer and less glamorous.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Bachelorhood is one of the unexpected benefits of being a bastard, as I was not considered much of a catch to most families. Not even families with a daughter of mixed ancestry welcomed me, for the daughter was herself usually frantic to squeeze into the elevator of social mobility through marriage to someone of a pure pedigree.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Brute force is not the answer, gentlemen, if the question is how to extract information and cooperation. Brute force will get you bad answers, lies, misdirection, or, worse yet, will get you the answer the prisoner thinks you want to hear.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Cognac made everything better, the equivalent of a mother’s kiss for a grown man.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“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.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“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.”
Viet Thanh
Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Every man should have a false bottom in his luggage. You never know when you’ll need it.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“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.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I could live without television, but not without books.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I liked my scotch undiluted, like I liked my truth. Unfortunately, undiluted truth was as affordable as eighteen-year-old single malt scotch.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“If the bloody history of the past few decades has taught me anything, it’s that the defense of freedom demands the muscularity only America can provide. ”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Interrogation is about the mind first, the body second. You don’t even have to leave a bruise or a mark on the body.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Interrogation is not punishment. Interrogation is a science.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Isn’t that what education is all about? Getting the student to sincerely say what the teacher wants to hear? Keep that in mind.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“It seems to me that one way to understand a person’s character is to understand what he thinks of others, especially those like oneself.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“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.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Most actors spent more time with their masks off than on, whereas in my case it was the reverse. No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Music and singing keep us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live. And we know we can love.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom…”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“One must be grateful for one’s education no matter how it arrives.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in ’54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Our society had been a kleptocracy of the highest order, the government doing its best to steal from the Americans, the average man doing his best to steal from the government, the worst of us doing our best to steal from each other.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“People who live in a given place may have difficulty seeing its charms as well as its faults, both of which are easily available to the tourist’s freshly peeled eyes.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans, those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Queuing was unnatural for our countrymen. Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing there’s someone who feels much worse.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“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.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he’d feel the exact same thing.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The American Dream, the culture of Hollywood, the practices of American democracy, and so on can altogether make America a disorienting place for those like us who hail from the Orient.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The citizenry can’t sift out what is useful and good if there’s too much opinion circulating.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think. Not thinking is more difficult than it sounds, and yet, with women, one should never think. Never. It simply won’t do.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The most important thing to understand is that while we courted, Americans dated, a pragmatic custom whereby a male and a female set a mutually agreeable time to meet, as if to negotiate a potentially profitable business venture. Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term , but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The only good thing about being fat, besides the eating, is that everyone loves a fat man. Yes? Yes! People love to laugh at fat men and pity them, too.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The only thing harder than knowing the right thing to do is to actually do the right thing.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The problem with winning, is that everyone’s so riled up they’re ready to fight again. The good thing about losing is it keeps you from fighting another war, at least for a while.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“The ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit. This is the lesson you must absorb by heart.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall. ”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“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.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“To a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Too much freedom of the press is unhealthy for a democracy.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Two choices and look at all the drama with every presidential election. Even two choices may be one too many. One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less is more, isn’t it?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Wars never die. They just go to sleep.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“We must be vigilant, even of each other, but mostly of ourselves. What my time in the cave taught me is that the ultimate life-and-death struggle is with ourselves. Foreign invaders might kill my body, but only I could kill my spirit.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“You have traveled to strange lands and been exposed to some dangerous ideas. It wouldn’t do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them. Think of the people, insulated for so long from foreign ideas. Exposure could lead to a real catastrophe for minds that aren’t ready for them.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
“You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
