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161 " Music and singing keeps us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live. "
― Viet Thanh Nguyen , The Sympathizer
162 " I confess that I admired him, even though he was my enemy. It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends. "
163 " «El coñac lo mejoraba todo, era el equivalente para los adultos de un beso de tu madre,…». "
164 " Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. "
165 " So it was that for two minutes we sang with all our hearts, feeling only for the past and turning our gaze from the future, swimmers doing the backstroke toward a waterfall. "
166 " I’m forty-six years old and I don’t care who knows it, but what I will tell you is that when a woman is forty-six and has lived her life the way she’s wanted to live it, she knows everything there is to know about what to do in the sack. "
167 " in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily "
168 " The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream? "
― Viet Thanh Nguyen , The Committed
169 " How do you know you've made a great work of art? A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won't even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atoms, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war. "
170 " Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician... had to keep his lips constantly moving. "
171 " What the song expressed so perfectly from lyric to melody was unrequited love, and we men of the south loved nothing more than unrequited love, cracked hearts our primary weakness after cigarettes, coffee, and cognac. "
172 " Refugees such as ourselves could never dare question the Disneyland ideology followed by most Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth. But Dr. Hedd was beyond reproach, for he was an English immigrant. His very existence as such validated the legitimacy of the former colonies, while his heritage and accent triggered the latent Anglophilia and inferiority complex found in many Americans. Dr. Hedd was clearly aware of his privilege and was amused at the discomfort he was causing his American hosts. "
173 " Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep. "
174 " 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. "
175 " Americans understood dating to be about investments and gains, short or long term, but we saw romance and courtship as being about losses. After all, the only worthwhile courtship involved persuading a woman who could not be persuaded, not a woman already predisposed to examine her calendar for her availability. "
176 " Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other. "
177 " With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn’t matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you’re floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life. "
― Viet Thanh Nguyen , The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
178 " I do not remember many things, and for all those things I do not remember, I am grateful, because the things I do remember hurt me enough. "
179 " Not for the first time, I longed to tell someone that I was one of them, a sympathizer with the Left, a revolutionary fighting for peace, equality, democracy, freedom, and independence, all the noble things my people had died for and I had hid for. "
180 " But to a bureaucrat paper was never just paper. Paper was life! "