The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

We wanted to live in a society of equality, although if we had to settle for owning more than our neighbor, that would be fine.

ingratiating to the point of being grating.

Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity!

What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.

That’s the problem with loyalty. The Boss sighed. It’s great until it’s a pain in the ass.

They also heard me as other, for when I opened my mouth and broke the beautiful china of their French language,

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity.

Capitalism has to win globally and become the worst version of itself before communism can subvert it.

The most difficult thing, when offered two false choices, was imagining a third choice, withheld deliberately or otherwise.

Seeing the failures of both communism and anticommunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand.

The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep-sea diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit.

Whoever said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions had gotten it all wrong. If you looked more closely, you could see that the road to Hell was paved with excuses.

I look at me all the time, and because I do not like what I see, I must turn to whiskey, which is so much better at improving one’s eyesight than any pair of glasses. To drink whiskey, in sufficient quantities, regardless of sufficient quality, is to polish the fuzzy mirror of one’s self and to adjust, in the manner of an optometrist, the focus of one’s lenses.

Twilight was the best time to contemplate the truth, which was usually found in the shadows rather than in stark light.

One can be just about anything and a fool at the same time.

But we were gangsters! Ruining lives, including our own, was the stated intent and existential hazard of our profession.

And even after slapping yourself on both sides of your face, and with your cheeks stinging, you could hear yourself continuing to laugh hysterically, although it might also be possible that you were just laughing historically. The joke, after all, was timeless.

You’re a Father was the title of the most horrifying horror movie you could imagine, unless it was one of the sequels like You’re a Father Part 2, 3, or 4, or, if you were Catholic, You’re a Father 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12.

This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke.