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talent is something you use, not something that uses you.
She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.
(Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.)
Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind.
Bon had the appearance of a good-looking man beaten to a pulp, except that was simply his God-given face.
America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl!
It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.
our camaraderie enough as we heeded the call of the Katyusha rockets, hissing in the distance like librarians demanding silence.
The next day we buried Linh and Duc. Their cold bodies had lain in a naval morgue overnight,
Sometimes he choked on his emotions so badly I feared I would have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.
I lay down and imagined we slumbered like soldiers even though the only place near Chinatown where one could buy bunk beds was the children’s section of gaudy furniture stores, overseen by Mexicans or people who looked like Mexicans. I could not tell anyone from the Southern Hemisphere apart but assumed they would take no offense, given that they themselves called me Chino to my face.
So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.
I was never so ashamed in my life, but I was also never so goddamn glad to be an American, either.
Regardless of political clique, these students gulped from the same overflowing cup of loneliness, drawing together for comfort like these ex-officers in the liquor store, hoping for the body heat of fellow sufferers in an exile so chilly even the California sun could not warm their cold feet. I
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.
When the anthem finished, the Congressman was mobbed by well-wishers onstage while the rest of the audience members sunk into their seats with postcoital smugness.
“Resentment.” That’s a good word. Always resent, never relent. Perhaps that should be our motto. There’s a ring to it, I said.
you will! And I promised.
Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both.
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.
War may be hell, but you know what? Hell’s better than this shithole.
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.
If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?
When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.
What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?
need to go in the opposite direction and claim that
