Viet Thanh Nguyen

“We instinctively knew that in order for Americans to find refugees like us acceptable, they first had to find our food digestible…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth, beginning with how she rapped on my door every morning, at…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“As the eldest son, he had duties, and he was used to working, having done so since leaving school at the age…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“A nineteenth-century Russian novel and vodka accompanied each other perfectly.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Don’t you see that the Americans need the anti-American?”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“America’s great promise! The promise of the immigrant! The promise of the American Dream! The promise that the people of this country…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“while pain is universal, it is also utterly private.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“At the gates, prickly rolls of barbed wire sagged with middle-aged disappointment.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“One must be grateful for one's education no matter how it arrives.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten,…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“It wouldn’t do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Time howled in my ear, screaming with laughter at the idea that we could control it with wristwatches, alarm clocks, revolutions, history.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don’t understand how many of the immigrants and refugees…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“I had to stop periodically to savor not only my soup but the marrow of my memories.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“I came to understand that in the United States, land of the fabled American dream, it is un-American to be a refugee.…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“What makes us human is that we're the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Despair may be thick, but friendship’s thicker.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“His habit of forgetting was too deeply ingrained, as if he passed his life perpetually walking backward through a desert, sweeping away…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“We were not a people who charged into war at the beck and call of bugle or trumpet. No, we fought to…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“The average American, or European, who feels that refugees or immigrants threaten their jobs does not recognize that the real culprits for…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“I was not a bastard, I was not a bastard, I was not, I was not, I was not, unless, somehow, I…

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was its own horror movie monster, smashing me under its foot.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen