All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

— 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

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

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

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

— 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

Give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

He responded with one of those looks of pity and amusement I was by now so used to getting, the kind that implied not only was my fly undone, but that there was nothing to see even if it was.

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

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

— Viet Thanh Nguyen