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

“A just memory opposes this kind of identity politics by recalling the
weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, and the forgotten. A just
memory says that ethically recalling our own is not enough to work through
the past, and neither is the less common phenomenon of ethically recalling
others. Both ethical approaches are needed, as well as an ethical
relationship to forgetting, since forgetting is inevitable. All individuals and
groups are invested in strategic forgetting, and we must forget if we are to
remember and to live. A just memory constantly tries to recall what might
be forgotten, accidentally or deliberately, through self-serving interests, the
debilitating effects of trauma, or the distraction offered by excessively
remembering something else, such as the heroism of the nation’s soldiers.
These excessive memories do not point to a just approach to the past, but to
an unjust one, defined by what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “memory
abusively summoned” by those in power.”
― 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