The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God’s eyes, man’s hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere.” (The Refugees Quotes)
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“Americans of all kinds believe that it is impossible for an American to become a refugee, although it is possible for refugees to become Americans and in that way be elevated one step closer to heaven.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“Are you going to be the kind of person who always pays the asking price?” my mother demanded. “Or the kind who fights to find out what something’s really worth?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“But I guess oil was to be found in every part of the world, just like anger and sorrow.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“But what does one say to a ghost, except to ask why he was here? I was afraid of the answer, so instead I said, ‘What took you so long?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“Even if refugees, undocumented immigrants, and legal immigrants are not all potential billionaires, that is no reason to exclude them. Even if their fate is to be the high-school dropout and the fast-food cashier, so what? That makes them about as human as the average American, and we are not about to deport the average American (are we?).”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“Her routine was as predictable as the rotation of the earth, beginning with how she rapped on my door every morning, at six, six fifteen, and six thirty, until at last I was awake.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“His habit of forgetting was too deeply ingrained, as if he passed his life perpetually walking backward through a desert, sweeping away his footprints.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“I am a bad refugee because I insist on seeing the historical reasons that create refugees and the historical reasons for denying refugee status to certain populations.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“I came to understand that in the United States, land of the fabled American dream, it is un-American to be a refugee. The refugee embodies fear, failure, and flight. Americans of all kinds believe that it is impossible for an American to become a refugee, although it is possible for refugees to become Americans and in that way be elevated one step closer to heaven.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“I had seen Star Wars a dozen times on video tape, and if anyone was so deprived as to have not watched it even once, then the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“I think of the novelist Haruki Murakami, who compares writing a novel to digging a hole through deep rock to reach a source of water. To access mystery and intuition requires hard work and is a gamble, for there is no guarantee that we will find that source of water.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“It is not your memories which haunt you. It is not what you have written down. It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget. What you must go on forgetting all your life. James Fenton, “A German Requiem”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“Like the homeless, refugees are living embodiments of a disturbing possibility: that human privileges are quite fragile, that one’s home, family, and nation are one catastrophe away from being destroyed.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“More than all those people who starved by famine, it was the thought of my mother not remembering what she looked like as a little girl that saddened me.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“No one has ever told you anything that would stop you, not from doing something you wanted.” “That’s because everything I’ve ever done I believed in.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“She sold silk at the Ben Thanh market and possessed the eyes of an experienced negotiator, smooth and unreadable as the beads of an abacus.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“She wondered what, if anything, she knew about love. Not much, perhaps, but enough to know that what she would do for him now she would do again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“The dead move on, but the living, we just stay here.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“The immigrant is the one who wants to come, unlike the refugee, who is forced to come.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“The reason for such behavior, her father said, was that the foreign tourists knew only one thing about this country, the war.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“They send him away and no one ever sees him again. That’s what happens to writers who put their names on things.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“This is what I think so many of us who work in the arts and the humanities hope to receive from our universities, from our government, from sometimes skeptical students and their parents: patience and faith in us as we test the limits of our ignorance, as we pursue what may very well be useless, as we go in search of that mystery and intuition that exist within all of us.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“While the clerks chatted in a language I could not understand, I hesitated, yearning to take everything home but unable to choose.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
“You wouldn’t know right from wrong.” There was no trace of anger in his voice. “The only way a man knows right from wrong is when he makes a choice.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Refugees
