Nothing Ever Dies Quotes

“Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one’s father was born and where one’s father was buried. My father’s father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“To understand our fate and theirs, we must do more than tell ghost stories. We must also tell the war stories that made ghosts and made us ghosts, the war stories that brought us here.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WROTE THAT “if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“No aesthetic work is inherently powerful. Foreigners, youth, or the disinterested who do not carry these memories of war may be unaffected, dismissive, blasé, bored or unnerved. To them, and perhaps to the majority of future visitors, when living memory of the war is dead, the wall will simply be a wall.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“But Little Saigon as strategic hamlet is not just physical real estate. It is also mnemonic real estate, for according to the informal terms of the American compact, the more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Any”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War