The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.

no one asks poor people if they want war.

He was a gravedigger, and nothing will do more to bestir a colonized subject than seeing white men naked and dead,

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.

Despair may be thick, but friendship’s thicker.

I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.

But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life!

they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.

Like all good students, I yearned for nothing but approval, even from fools.

A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.

What if he’s not a spy? We’ll be killing the wrong man. Then it would be murder. Bon sipped his beer. First, he said, the General knows stuff we don’t. Second, we’re not killing. This is an assassination. Your guys did this all the time. Third, this is war. Innocent people get killed. It’s only murder if you know they’re innocent. Even so, that’s a tragedy, not a crime.

Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn’t that what Original Sin is all about?

revolutionaries can never be innocent.

Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private.

We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else’s pain until we talk about it.

Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything!

We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do. They take advantage of things, like your cousins, and they don’t question things. As long as things work for them, then they support those things.

Unfortunately, withholding judgment was not one of my strong suits.

I always assume a man is at least a latent homosexual until proven otherwise.

You think that because you went to college people should listen to what you say? Too bad you’ve got a bachelor of science in bullshit.

Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb.

oppressive as unwanted love.

Although I did not believe in God, I believed in ghosts. I knew this to be true because while I did not fear God, I feared ghosts.

No one could make a guilty pleasure like the French.

We would all be in Hell if convicted of our thoughts.

Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle.

When a mother asks her boy if he is ready to be a man, can he say anything else but yes?

Stolichnaya vodka. That name, with its echoes of Lenin, Stalin, and Kalashnikov, made me feel better about my capitalist indulgences.

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

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.

Life’s a suicide mission. That’s very philosophical of you, I said. It doesn’t change the fact that you’re crazy.

What’s crazy is living when there’s no reason to live, he said. What am I living for?

I wanted to comfort him and it hurt me that he would not let me.

Give a coward a second chance, he’ll just run again.

What am I dying for? he cried back. I’m dying because this world I’m living in isn’t worth dying for! If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live.

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.

If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?

What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves.

the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.

if happiness is not guaranteed, freedom is, and that, gentlemen, is more important.

college fraternities, which seemed to recruit only those who would have been eligible for the Hitler Youth.

No author was immune from having his own ideas and words quoted back to him favorably.

I need not look in the mirror or at the faces of my fellow men to find a likeness to God. I need only look at their selves and inside my own to realize we would not be killers if God Himself was not one, too.

It would be better if every Sunday before the priest talks a warrior gets up and tells people who he’s killed on their behalf. Listening is the least they could do.

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.

My favourite quote!

You tried to play their 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.

Human memory is short, and time is long.

people who do not get the joke are dangerous people indeed.

Isn’t it remarkable that in a communist country money can still buy you anything you want? It’s not remarkable, I muttered. It’s funny.