Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I miss you more than I remember you.”

— Ocean Vuong

2. “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”

— Ocean Vuong

3. “You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”

— Ocean Vuong

4. “What a terrible life, I think now, to have to move so fast just to stay in one place.”

— Ocean Vuong

5. “They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”

— Ocean Vuong

6. “When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”

— Ocean Vuong

7. “In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”

— Ocean Vuong

8. “My mother said I could be anything I wanted – but I chose to live.”

— Ocean Vuong

9. “How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.”

— Ocean Vuong

10. “Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?”

— Ocean Vuong

11. “Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence – but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

— Ocean Vuong

12. “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”

— Ocean Vuong

13. “Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

— Ocean Vuong

14. “To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

— Ocean Vuong

15. “No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it.”

— Ocean Vuong

16. “I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”

— Ocean Vuong

17. “When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote begin with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere. Even when I know something to be true I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real.”

— Ocean Vuong

18. “Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.”

— Ocean Vuong

19. “Let me begin again.”

— Ocean Vuong

20. “Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.”

— Ocean Vuong

21. “Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.”

— Ocean Vuong

22. “A woman, a girl, a gun. This is an old story, one anyone can tell.”

— Ocean Vuong

23. “What is a country but a life sentence?”

— Ocean Vuong

24. “Remember: the rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field – it was always there – where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.”

— Ocean Vuong

25. “Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.”

— Ocean Vuong

26. “If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.”

— Ocean Vuong

27. “It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus – that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”

— Ocean Vuong

28. “Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes – or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that – yes – your name is still attached to a living thing.”

— Ocean Vuong

29. “Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves?”

— Ocean Vuong

30. “He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.”

— Ocean Vuong

31. “The cruelest walls are made of glass.”

— Ocean Vuong

32. “Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it.”

— Ocean Vuong

33. “All freedom is relative – you know too well – and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough.”

— Ocean Vuong

34. “Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”

— Ocean Vuong

35. “To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.”

— Ocean Vuong

36. “I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence – I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

— Ocean Vuong

37. “I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was.”

— Ocean Vuong

38. “The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.”

— Ocean Vuong

39. “A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”

— Ocean Vuong

40. “If you find yourself trapped inside a dimming world, remember it was always this dark inside the body. Where the heart, like any law, stops only for the living.”

— Ocean Vuong

41. “They say every snowflake is different – but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned.”

— Ocean Vuong

42. “What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

— Ocean Vuong

43. “Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.”

— Ocean Vuong

44. “They say nothing lasts forever and I’m writing you in the voice of an endangered species.”

— Ocean Vuong

45. “Sometimes I feel like an ampersand. I wake up waiting for the crush. Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish. How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer – only to pick up the pieces?”

— Ocean Vuong

46. “What are we if not what the light says we are?”

— Ocean Vuong

47. “The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit.”

— Ocean Vuong

48. “I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful.”

— Ocean Vuong

49. “To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time.”

— Ocean Vuong

50. “They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.”

— Ocean Vuong