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The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.
the atmosphere was strangely quiet in Saigon, most of the Saigonese citizenry behaving like people in a scuppered marriage, willing to cling gamely to each other and drown so long as nobody declared the adulterous truth.
Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
The mediocrities had been dispatched to Indochina, allowing France to staff its colonial bureaucracies with the schoolyard bully, the chess club misfit, the natural-born accountant, and the diffident wallflower,
I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After all, if she had not blurred the lines between maid and priest, or allowed them to be blurred, I would not exist.
Let me assure you, if there is one part of a prostitute that is made of gold, it is not her heart.
a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.
the gravity of age worked its way from the top downward with the years. This commenced with the facial features, then crept south to the neck, the breasts, the tummy, etc., so that an older mistress was plump and juicy where it counted long after her visage was dry and haggard, in which case one could simply put a basket on her head.
No, Madame, I said, I wouldn’t want to marry that, also the two-faced truth, for marriage was not the first thing on my mind when I saw her onstage.
colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color,
The Vietnamese peasant will not object to the use of airpower, for he is apolitical, interested only in feeding himself and his family. Bombing his village will of course upset him, but the cost is outweighed ultimately by how airpower will persuade him that he is on the wrong side if he chooses communism, which cannot protect him. (p.
to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.
automatic weapons slung on their shoulders also made me homesick, confirming I was again in a country with its malnourished neck under a dictator’s loafer.
We have shown that the human mind, subject to the right conditions, will break down faster than the human body.
Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived,
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.
After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.
Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.
Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over. We can fuck ourselves just fine.
Now you know what I know, don’t you? Yes, I said, sobbing still. I get it. I get it! What was it that I got? The joke. Nothing was the punch line,
How could I forget that every truth meant at least two things, that slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?
and people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed. They are the ones who say nothing with great piousness, who ask everyone else to die for nothing, who revere nothing.
he was my interrogator but also my only confidant; he was the fiend who had tortured me but also my friend.
He was the faceless man who had tortured me, for my own good, for the sake of nothing. But I could still recognize him, for who but a man with two minds could understand a man with no face?
I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn’t the French and the Americans done exactly the same?
Our life and our death have taught us always to sympathize with the undesirables among the undesirables.
We remain that most hopeful of creatures, a revolutionary in search of a revolution, although we will not dispute being called a dreamer doped by an illusion.
we swear to keep, on penalty of death, this one promise: We will live!
