Emma Claire Everett’s Reviews > The Sympathizer > Status Update

“we are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves. It’s as if our noses are pressed up against the pages of a book, the words right in front of us but which we cannot read. Just as distance is needed for legibility, so it is that if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can” (342).

“If one understood history’s laws, then one could control history’s chronology, wresting it away from capitalism, already intent on monopolizing time. We wake, work, eat, and sleep according to what the landlord, the owner, the banker, the politician, and the schoolmaster command, Man had said. We accept that our time belongs to them, when in truth our time belongs to us” (339).

“that wonder drug only numbs the body and the brain. What about my mind? I’ve discovered that the only way to manage pain is to imagine someone else’s greater pain, a suffering that diminishes your own” (337).

“On and on the thoughts came, the thousand cockroaches of time crawling over me until I shivered in agony and revulsion. I wept for myself then, and the tears under my blindfold had the unexpected benefit of clearing the dust from my mind’s eye, enough for me to realize that I was not blind” (326).

“At any moment I feared that Bon would rise and order me to charge with him into the enemy’s fire, and I knew that I would not be able to do it. I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die” (306-307).

“Somewhere on the other side you were waiting for me, Commandant […]. While I was still innocent of this knowledge, it was impossible not to sense something foreboding as we plucked off the leeches adhering to us with the stubbornness of bad memories” (304).

“A creek gurgled in the arroyo where we stopped and where I scratched my face against a vine of bougainvillea. I set down the leg as the marines began digging a shallow grave. My hand was gummy with blood and I knelt by the creek to wash it in the cold water. By the time the marines finished, my hand was dry and a faint stroke of pink light was on the horizon” (303).

“I could see the crumbling sandstone ruins of an ancient temple, erected long ago by some fallen race, overseen by the crowned head of some forgotten tyrant, blank eyes blinded by the waste of his empire” (299).

“The sun was high in the sky and my throat was parched. I could see the Mekong in the far distance through my binoculars, a brown belt dividing the earth’s green torso. I could see question marks and exclamation points of woodsmoke issuing from farmhouses and brick factories. I could see bare-shinned farmers wading after their water buffalos, fetlock deep in the muddy water of rice paddies” (298-299).

“I need not look in the mirror or at the faces of my fellow men to find a likeness to God. I need only look at their selves and inside my own to realize we would not be killers if God Himself was not one, too” (267).