Quotes From "The Sympathizer" By Viet Thanh Nguyen

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and I was right to kill him. Wasn't I? Viet Thanh Nguyen

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. Viet Thanh Nguyen

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything. That means you can't change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside. Viet Thanh Nguyen

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. Viet Thanh Nguyen

Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud. Viet Thanh Nguyen

Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat? Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored. Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

Cheered by the optimism that one sometimes had at the beginning of strenuous exercise, a kind of helium that filled our lungs and carried us along Viet Thanh Nguyen

That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others. Viet Thanh Nguyen

Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything. Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God. Viet Thanh Nguyen

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? Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it Viet Thanh Nguyen