Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day – neither good or bad, but something we passed through.”

— Ocean Vuong

52. “I met a man tonight... maybe I shouldn’t have, but he had the hands of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to.”

— Ocean Vuong

53. “It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do – how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.”

— Ocean Vuong

54. “If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming.”

— Ocean Vuong

55. “What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place.”

— Ocean Vuong

56. “We try to preserve life, even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.”

— Ocean Vuong

57. “Because he tasted like the river and maybe you were one wing away from sinking.”

— Ocean Vuong

58. “Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.”

— Ocean Vuong

59. “Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky.”

— Ocean Vuong

60. “I enter my life the way words entered me – by falling through the silence of this wide open mouth.”

— Ocean Vuong

61. “Note to self: If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here.”

— Ocean Vuong

62. “The truth is I’m worried they will get us before they get us.”

— Ocean Vuong

63. “To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”

— Ocean Vuong

64. “Language excites me. Irrational thought excites me. I spend most of my time listening instead of writing. A shard of language might come: a phrase, a word, an anagram, and I’d just keep it in my pocket, like a little seed, warming in my fist.”

— Ocean Vuong

65. “We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.- P53.”

— Ocean Vuong

66. “The truest ruins are not written down.”

— Ocean Vuong

67. “If Mario fell off, he would have to start the level over, from the beginning. This was also called dying.”

— Ocean Vuong

68. “Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”

— Ocean Vuong

69. “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”

— Ocean Vuong

70. “If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”

— Ocean Vuong

71. “The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”

— Ocean Vuong

72. “The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. I had the urge to break through the pane and leap out the window.”

— Ocean Vuong

73. “I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, 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

74. “Our hands empty except for our hands.”

— Ocean Vuong

75. “To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched – and alive.”

— Ocean Vuong

76. “He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth.”

— Ocean Vuong

77. “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”

— Ocean Vuong

78. “As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”

— Ocean Vuong

79. “Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail – or whatever you want to call your god – should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself.”

— Ocean Vuong

80. “Everyone can forget us – as long as you remember.”

— Ocean Vuong

81. “Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.”

— Ocean Vuong

82. “But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?”

— Ocean Vuong

83. “I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.”

— Ocean Vuong

84. “It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.”

— Ocean Vuong

85. “Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, ’it’s been an honor to serve my country.”

— Ocean Vuong

86. “Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”

— Ocean Vuong

87. “When they ask you where you’re from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst – into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.”

— Ocean Vuong

88. “I’m drinking light, I thought. I’m filling myself with light. The milk would erase all the dark inside me with a flood of brightness.”

— Ocean Vuong

89. “The say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, ’it’s been an honor to serve my country.”

— Ocean Vuong

90. “Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. in which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be the third language that animates where the tongue falters.”

— Ocean Vuong

91. “To love another man is to leave no one behind to forgive me.”

— Ocean Vuong

92. “It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.”

— Ocean Vuong

93. “I remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted.”

— Ocean Vuong

94. “Because something in him know she’d be there. That she was waiting. Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.”

— Ocean Vuong

95. “The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run. The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.”

— Ocean Vuong

96. “My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.”

— Ocean Vuong

97. “I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.”

— Ocean Vuong

98. “That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.”

— Ocean Vuong

99. “I watched, through the keyhole, not the man showering, but the rain falling through him: guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders.”

— Ocean Vuong

100. “I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?”

— Ocean Vuong