The Sympathizer Quotes

"Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom."

"Privacy, not cleanliness, is my only prerequisite for writing this confession."

"I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces."

"Hope's thin, he said. Despair's thick. Like blood."

"Despair may be thick, but friendship's thicker."

"It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends."

"The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess."

"Nothing Emerson wrote was ever truer of America, but that was not the only reason I underlined his words once, twice, thrice."

"Being a bachelor also meant I could chat without consequence with the call girls, brazenly displaying their shapely shanks among the evacuees."

"They call us whores, she said. And they call Saigon the whore city, don't they? Honey, I can connect the dots."

"Some species of sub-undersecretary, he probably had neither dreams nor nightmares."

"If looks could emasculate, she would have walked off with my sac in her purse."

"Bon did likewise with Linh, her face tense but determined."

"All Linh could say was, No, darling, we don’t have any water, but we’ll get some soon."

"The contours of skin and flesh separating one individual from another merged."

"We exuded the stink of sweat, of unwashed clothing, and of anxiety."

"The acceleration pressed me backward while the woman in front of me braced her arm against my knees."

"The General nodded stiffly, baring his teeth just enough to indicate that he should never be expected to reciprocate."

"Instead of a six-string electric guitar slung low across his hips, he carried an M16 with a twenty-round magazine."

"The ramp slowly rose and clamped shut, sealing us worms into our can."

"I had seen roasted remains before, in a desolate field outside of Hue, carbonized corpses fused into the metal."

"The sun continued rising notch by notch on its rack, the light becoming harsher and brighter."

"They were, no doubt, thinking what I was. Good-bye, Vietnam. Au revoir, Saigon—"

"A hush blanketed the passengers, hypnotized by trepidation and anticipation."

"The relief from the noise only made audible that someone was shooting at us."

"Our guys, Bon said, knees drawn up to his chest."

"The plane’s gas tanks blew, the fireball illuminating a vast stretch of the airfield."

"Instead of a villa, they rented a bungalow in a slightly less tony part of Los Angeles."

"I just needed him to say it to me again, as he had on other occasions, such as the time I passed to him a cartridge of film recording the heliborne assault plans of a Ranger battalion. Innocent men would die as a result of my actions, wouldn’t they? Of course men will die, Man said, masking his words behind his folded hands as we knelt in a pew. But they aren’t innocent. Neither are we, my friend. We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much and have done too much."

"I can assure you this is not how they scream. Would you like to hear how they scream?"

"We must not allow our people to grow complacent."

"It’s a difficult time for getting support publicly, since the American people don’t want to fight another war. So we have to assemble ourselves slowly."

"The only chance for them to regain their honor and be men again is to reclaim our country."

"We must plan far ahead for decades. We must live and work underground, as they did."

"History has moved us. We have no choice but to fight, to resist evil and to resist being forgotten."

"One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less is more, isn’t it?"

"Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything!"

"One must be grateful for one’s education no matter how it arrives."

"Art could not be separated from politics, and politics needed art in order to reach the people where they lived, through entertaining them."

"Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences."

"A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real."

"No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing there’s someone who feels much worse."

"The best medical treatment is a sense of relativism."

"Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland."

"If something is worth dying for, then you've got a reason to live."

"Nothing was so true, and yet nothing was so mysterious, for the questions of who the people were and what they might want remained unanswered."

"All anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered."

"My American Dream is to see once more, before I die, the land where I was born, to taste once more the ripe persimmons from the tree of my family’s garden."

"Sometimes the work of a subversive is purposeful, but sometimes, it is accidental."

"Money did not live until it was spent, particularly in the company of friends."

"We respected our poets and assumed they had something important to teach us."

"Though we cannot be home in reality, we can return in Fantasia."

"Listening to her sing, all I wanted was to immolate myself in a night with her to remember forever and ever."

"The most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget."

"The first few times in approaching girls, during my lycée years, I had thought too much, hesitated, and, as a result, flailed and failed."

"Music and singing keep us alive, give us hope. If we can feel, we know we can live."

"The double meaning was also present in how cleavage separated a woman from a man and yet drew him to her with the irresistible force of sliding down a slippery slope."

"The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine."

"Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself."

"We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language."

"Spiritual teleportation unsettled most people, who, if they thought of others at all, preferred to think that others were just like them or could be just like them."

"Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it—life is not important."

"The only thing different in your case is that the poor slob didn’t have time to think about it."

"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."

"We could not be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved."

"You want private company? You’ll get it, trust me. These girls are veterans. They know how to take care of shy guys."

"How else could one tell whether a movie was faring well or badly if the audience did not respond to it?"

"The audience seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly, given the cheering and clapping."

"I wanted to close my eyes but could not, unable to do more than blink a few times rapidly."

"The lack of music only made more audible the audience’s sudden silence."

"He had hammered into existence a thing of beauty and horror."

"Faced with ungraceful roles, they had comported themselves with as much grace as possible."

"The only solid thing anchoring me to the material world was the rifle in my hands."

"To live was to be haunted by the inevitability of one’s own decay."

"The airwaves bore those love songs, laden with emotion, across Laos and into our homeland."

"I shivered, and gazing into the darkness of the forest, staring down the length of my weapon, I saw the shapes of other ghosts among the haunted trees."

"Silence ensued, for how long I do not know, until the foot nudged me again."

"With the liberation only hours away, I hid my joy and excitement but not my worry for my family."

"My wife was at home with the children, one of our couriers close by to ensure their safety."

"I didn’t want our liberators to shoot me on the last day of the war."

"How indeed? When the pilot dropped his bombs, the sense of dread possessing my fellow officers touched me."

"But what can I tell you besides the fact that being on fire feels like being on fire?"

"The pain of being burned was hardly less than the pain of having no skin and no face."

"Excruciating is the right word, but it cannot convey the feeling it describes."

"Certain things can be learned only through the feeling of excruciation."

"People like you must be purged because you bear the contamination that can destroy the revolution’s purity."

"We can never stop confessing because we are imperfect."

"The only way to manage pain is to imagine someone else’s greater pain, a suffering that diminishes your own."

"Suffering made us. Suffering for the people is what we chose because we sympathized so much with their suffering."

"Believe me when I say that I know how you feel, and that this has to be done."

"The greatest suffering comes from losing his country."

"Revolutionaries, my friend. Suffering made us."