Top 500 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “A thousand sons must have been where he was now and turned back from their horses, wagons, rickshaws, cyclos, buses, schooners, trains, even dusty sandaled feet.”

— Ocean Vuong

452. “We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt think and skull-less.”

— Ocean Vuong

453. “At one point Hai opened the window to let the spring in, and it seemed to lift everyone inside, their heads leaning back to relish the sweet-scented flourish. Only in springtime, it seemed, does gravity work backward here, the dandelion pollen rising in great squalls, the flower buds shooting up, further from the ground, as if pulled by the sky’s sudden need for them, all of it under the crisp brilliance of April sunlight. Watching this, Hai felt himself displaced by a wild, untenable gratitude.”

— Ocean Vuong

454. “Every generation says this of itself, but these were indeed bewildering and unprecedented times he lived in, a time before iPhones were everywhere, and people still looked up as they walked, their heads filled with self-generated thoughts floating up from deep pits in the subconscious.”

— Ocean Vuong

455. “The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language – perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue.”

— Ocean Vuong

456. “How could I have known, that by pressing this pen to paper, I was touching us back from extinction?”

— Ocean Vuong

457. “Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive. But what do you do with that kind of box? Where do you put it down?”

— Ocean Vuong

458. “Note to self: If a guy tells you his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac, there’s a very good chance he’s a douchebag.”

— Ocean Vuong

459. “Young enough to believe nothing.”

— Ocean Vuong

460. “This is November, and heat from their wounds comes out as steam between their fingers.”

— Ocean Vuong

461. “The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.”

— Ocean Vuong

462. “His voice dropped, gone was the soft, sweet lilt. Russia was eighteen but still had the raspy timbre of adolescence, the kind of voice that make you want to say yes even if he’s just asking you the time.”

— Ocean Vuong

463. “Look, I have it too. It’s just like the weather. Like clouds and rain and stuff. They go away. But some of us spend more time in London, you know? Or Seattle. You’re just raining right now.”

— Ocean Vuong

464. “You feel for your throat because history has proven the skull lodged in the gravedigger’s hands is often the one behind your face.”

— Ocean Vuong

465. “I needed this act to have an author, a consciousness held in a defined and culpable space. For once, I wanted, needed, an enemy.”

— Ocean Vuong

466. “Hai considered this. Indeed, at what granular material moment did bread become cake? Or was it always cake, falsely named to amplify bread beyond its potential?”

— Ocean Vuong

467. “The city is so white it is ready for ink.”

— Ocean Vuong

468. “People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal.”

— Ocean Vuong

469. “Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.”

— Ocean Vuong

470. “The state, where people live, is a battleground state.”

— Ocean Vuong

471. “The Hubble telescope swoops the other way. Halley’s Comet shoots back behind the trees as the Humvees roll, again, into Iraq.”

— Ocean Vuong

472. “Okay.” Hai nodded, but his mind was somewhere else. “Hey. Do you think a life you can’t remember is still a good life?” The question sounded almost silly aloud. “I mean, like – ” “Yes,” said Sony. “Why’s that?” “Because someone else will remember it.”

— Ocean Vuong

473. “Where “a home,” like this one, is often a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer – including family – that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?”

— Ocean Vuong

474. “Everything else, what I do, what I’ve done, the goals and the promises, they’re all, like, ghosts. For most people, their ghost is inside them, waiting to float out when they die. But my ghost is in pieces.” He pointed with his chin at the scattered trees. “It’s all over the place, caught in all the spots where I snagged myself.”

— Ocean Vuong

475. “You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.”

— Ocean Vuong

476. “I lied – why I’m not quite sure. Maybe I wanted to give him the power of this small knowledge over me.”

— Ocean Vuong

477. “If you aim for Gladness and miss, you’ll find us. For we are called East Gladness. Gladness itself being no more, renamed to Millsap nearly a century ago after Tony Millsap, the boy who returned from the Great War with no limbs and became a hero – proof you could loose almost all of yourself in the country and still gain a whole town.”

— Ocean Vuong

478. “Listen here, this country,” she lowered her voice, “was purposefully built on war. The reptilians shape-shift into politicians and celebrities, then use these puppets to start wars so they never run out of bad energy to consume. Don’t you get it? War is fertilizer for their crops.”

— Ocean Vuong

479. “The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included.”

— Ocean Vuong

480. “Yes, the period in the sentence – it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.”

— Ocean Vuong

481. “My favorite kind of darkness is the one inside us, I want to tell him.”

— Ocean Vuong

482. “I watch as two daughters car for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.”

— Ocean Vuong

483. “You see, carrots become bright orange because it’s so dark in the ground. They make their own light because the sun never reaches that far – like those fish in the ocean who glow from nothing? So when you eat it, you take in the carrot’s will to go upward. To heaven.”

— Ocean Vuong

484. “You will see those shriveled into their eighth or ninth decade bent in chairs or beds, left in the hallways for hours to stare, baffled, at the ceiling fan or a spot on the wall, some heads swiveling at each passing shadow, calling the name they once gave to a son or daughter, faces they haven’t seen in months, years.”

— Ocean Vuong

485. “I lay there in the dark, mouthing the words till he appears again – young and warm and enough.”

— Ocean Vuong

486. “People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal. And that makes them tell each other stupid stories,” he said softly.”

— Ocean Vuong

487. “You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied.”

— Ocean Vuong

488. “I didn’t know the cost of entering a song – was to lose your way back.”

— Ocean Vuong

489. “The boys had this way of knowing what the other was thinking without ever using words. “Because it’s like that when you’re fourteen,” he said. The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing – which is also the same as being very old.”

— Ocean Vuong

490. “With money I earned by myself, I gave my daughter a room just so she can read in peace for a day. And I sat there and watched her read, sipping a scotch from the bar. And I cried like a baby. And Lina, my little Lina, she said, ‘Mama, why are you crying?’ And I said, ′ I know how God feels now.”

— Ocean Vuong

491. “What good is beauty, any beauty, if nobody wins?”

— Ocean Vuong

492. “How easily a face is disfigured in the abstraction a pile of bodies so naturally makes.”

— Ocean Vuong

493. “With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy – but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated.”

— Ocean Vuong

494. “But the thing about forever is you can’t take it back.”

— Ocean Vuong

495. “Who told me sunflowers were his favorite because they grew higher than people. Who ran his fingers so gently down their lengths I thought red blood pulsed inside the stalks.”

— Ocean Vuong

496. “What you see might not always be what you feel. And what you feel may no longer be real.”

— Ocean Vuong

497. “In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.”

— Ocean Vuong

498. “I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.”

— Ocean Vuong

499. “I remember cupping the ash and writing the words live live live on the foreheads of the three women sitting in the room. How the ash eventually hardened into ink on a blank page. How there’s ash on this very page.”

— Ocean Vuong

500. “It was one of those friendships that came on quick, like the heat on a July day, and long after midnight you could still feel its sticky film on your skin as you lie awake in your room, the fan blowing in what remained of the scorched hours, and realize for the first time in your peep of a life that no one is ever truly alone.”

— Ocean Vuong