“lmost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere.”

“Quoting Nguyen Du - Talent and destiny are apt to feud.”

“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. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?”

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

“Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it”

“Priests always had much attention lavished on them by their starstruck fans,those devout housewives and wealthy congregants who treated them as if they were guardians of the velvet rope blocking entrance into that ever so exclusive nightclub, Heaven.”

“I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air?”

“If God did not exist, then neither did divine punishment, but this meant nothing to ghosts who did not need God.”

“We lie in wait for the right moment and the just cause, which, at this moment, is simply wanting to live.”

“Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything.”

“That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.”