Vietnamese Quotes

“Có những người mình yêu
Nhưng mà không gần được.
Có những người yêu mình
Nhưng mà không ừ được.”
― Nguyễn Thiên Ngân

“Tôi, 24 tuổi, thức dậy chỉ thấy hư vô. Không thể mất mát trong hư vô.
Không người con gái nào để thương yêu
Không có người đàn ông nào để trọng
Không có kẻ thù nào để ác
Không có tội lỗi nào để phạm
Không có cả một nỗi buồn để khóc
Cũng chẳng có chiến lũy nào để chết
Chúng ta làm gì cho hết buổi chiều nay?”
― Lưu Quang Vũ

“Có những người yêu đã ra đi bỗng một ngày nào đó trở lại. Vì sao? Không vì sao cả. Vì một chọn lựa tưởng rằng đúng cuối cùng sai. Và đã trở lại với một người mình đã phụ bạc để muốn hàn gắn lại một vết thương. Một vết thương đã lành lặn lâu rồi bất chợt vỡ òa như một cơn tỉnh thức. Tỉnh thức trên vết thương. Trên một nỗi đau tưởng đã thuộc về quá khứ. Nhưng không, không có gì thuộc về quá khứ cả. Thời gian trôi đi và vết thương vẫn còn đó. Nó vẫn chờ được thức dậy một lúc nào đó để sống lại như chính bản thân nó là một vết thương.

Nhưng vết thương khi đã được đánh thức thì nó không còn là vết thương cũ vì giờ đây nó là một vết thương tỉnh thức. Một vết thương tỉnh thức là một vết thương biết rõ nó là một vết thương. Nó đã thức dậy và nó nhận ra rằng nó đã được khai sinh trên tâm hồn một con người và đã có một thời gian dài làm đau đớn con người đó. Vết thương tỉnh thức là con mắt sáng ngời. Nó nhìn ngược về quá khứ và ngó thẳng đến tương lai. Nó mách bảo cho chủ nhân nó rằng không có một vết thương nào vô tư mà sinh thành cả. Nó là một nỗi đớn đau như trời đất trở dạ làm thành một cơn giông bão.”
― Trịnh Công Sơn

“Our gathering was not as strange a thing as it might have appeared. A xenophobe would see a company of foreigners in camouflage uniforms, carrying out military drills and calisthenics, and might imagine us to be the lead element of some nefarious Asian invasion of the American homeland, a Yellow Peril in the Golden State, a diabolical dream of Ming the Merciless sprung to life. Far from it. The General's men, by preparing themselves to invade our now communist homeland, were in fact turning themselves into new Americans. 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.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“My chances of returning to America were small, and I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black hoodlums of the unconscious. There were also many things about America with which I was less enchanted, but why be negative?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of it, eager not for drink but for a bit of talk. ”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in a lack of moderation, raising a glass to lower inhibitions, imbibing spirits to raise their own. ”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“Japanese American, she corrected me. Not Japanese. And Vietnamese American, not Vietnamese. You must claim America, she said. America will not give itself to you. If you do not claim America, if America is not in your heart, America will throw you into a concentration camp or a reservation or a plantation.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Should 'sleep' be plural? No, sleep is an idea, like love, no s. So many decisions in a single simple sentence. Exhausting, this elaborate dance of words.”
― Thanhha Lai, Butterfly Yellow

“Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.
That night I promise myself I'd never be wordless when you needed me to speak for you. So I began my career as our family's official interpreter. From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, our stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.

It's true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearly through service...”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Either that information was not believed or inexplicably never passed on to the regional military command. When the attack finally came, Vienamese civilians were defenseless.”
― Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War After The War

“I laid out the charges against him of subversion, conspiracy, and murder, but emphasized that he was innocent until proven guilty, which made him laugh. Your American puppet masters like to say that, but it's stupid, he said. History, humanity, religion, this war tells us exactly the reverse. We are all guilty until proven innocent, as even the Americans have shown. Why else do they believe everyone is really Viet Cong? Why else do they shoot first and ask questions later? Because to them all yellow people are guilty until proven innocent. 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. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“The gray guilt had grown heavy, refusing to pause its relentless infusion into her joints and marrow. After all, it was her fault her brother was taken.”
― Thanhha Lai, Butterfly Yellow

“Tiếng chim vách núi nhỏ dần
Rì rầm tiếng suối khi gần khi xa
Ngoài thềm rơi chiếc lá đa
Tiếng rơi rất mỏng như là rơi nghiêng”
― Trần Đăng Khoa, Góc Sân và Khoảng Trời

“Y'all have a song?'

H nods. 'Bất-tơ-phơ-lai de-lồ.'

'Butterfly yellow? You mean yellow butterfly.'

H starts to explain but pulls out her notebook. The most prepared notetaker on earth.

Bướm = butterfly, vàng = yellow.”
― Thanhha Lai, Butterfly Yellow

“I was doing my best imitation of a Third World child on one of those milk cartons passed around elementary schools for American children to deposit their pennies and dimes in order to help poor Alejandro, Abdullah, or Ah Sing have a hot lunch and an immunization. And I was thankful, truly! But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“No one can sweep,
for why sweep away hope?
No one can splash water,
for why splash away joy?

(celebration of Tet)”
― Thanhha Lai, Inside Out & Back Again

“...I could not help but feel moved by the plight of these poor people. Perhaps it was not correct, politically speaking, for me to feel sympathy for them, but my mother would have been one of them if she were alive. She was a poor person, I was her poor child, and no one asks poor people if they want war.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Except for him, most of our fellow exiles had been shrunken by their experience, either absolutely through the aforementioned maladies of migration, or relatively, surrounded by Americans so tall they neither looked through nor looked down on these newcomers. They simply looked over them.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I breakfasted with the crapulent major a week later. It was an earthy, quotidian scene, the kind Walt Whitman would have loved to write about, a sketch of the new America featuring hot rice porridge and fried crullers at a Monterey Park noodle shop crammed full of unrepentantly unassimilated Chinese and a few other assorted Asians.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat. We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Good-bye, America, the grizzled captain said during our ascent, looking out the window at a landscape I could not see from my aisle seat. I've had enough of you, he said. The affectless lieutenant, sitting in the middle, agreed. Why did we ever call it the beautiful country? he said. I had no answer.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Maman ordered the pork meatball bánh mì, and I ordered the lemongrass chicken bánh mì, with an order of shrimp salad rolls to share.
"People forget about the French and the Vietnamese, sometimes," she told me as we waited. "The French brought their baguettes, and the Vietnamese used them to make bánh mì sandwiches. And then the French came home with a love for Vietnamese chicken soup deep in their souls."
"There are perks to imperialism," I noted.”
― Hillary Manton Lodge, A Table by the Window

“Cool and serene, I thought... like a pale Japanese watercolour. After a few months in the province and many field trips, I still couldn't believe the delicate beauty of the Vietnamese countryside.”
― Robert H. Dodd, Don't Break My Rice Bowl: A beautiful and gripping novel, highlighting the personal and tragic struggles faced during the Vietnam War, bringing the late author and his 'forgotten' manuscript to life

“Better to be a small man and stay with people you like near the girl you love than a transferred giant, yes?”
― Robert H. Dodd, Don't Break My Rice Bowl: A beautiful and gripping novel, highlighting the personal and tragic struggles faced during the Vietnam War, bringing the late author and his 'forgotten' manuscript to life

“The higher our degree of concentration, the greater the quality of our life.
Vietnamese girls are often told by their mothers that if they concentrate, they will be more beautiful. This is the kind of beauty that comes from dwelling deeply in the present moment. When a young lady moves inattentively, she does not look as fresh or at ease. Her mother may not use these words, but she is encouraging her daughter to practice Right Concentration”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching : Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation

“Em yêu anh yêu em.”
― Helen Hoang, The Bride Test

“The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom, and peace. But in the face of United States aggression, we have risen up, united as one man for more details (evisagov.vn)”
― eservices

“Cơ thể cũng biết thương chủ thể”
― Nguyễn Kỳ An