Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time.”

— Ocean Vuong

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

108. “I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong.”

— Ocean Vuong

109. “Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time- believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of. Maybe we’ll be the opposite of buffaloes. We’ll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home.”

— Ocean Vuong

110. “Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through.”

— Ocean Vuong

111. “If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth.”

— Ocean Vuong

112. “When we left it, the city was still smoldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered by the bombed bakery. Broken baguettes. Crushed croissants. Gutted cars. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us.”

— Ocean Vuong

113. “Although the women cannot read it, she knows it signals a name, something given by a mother or father, something weightless yet carried forever, like a heartbeat.”

— Ocean Vuong

114. “We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it’s also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.”

— Ocean Vuong

115. “Green waves surround this black rock where I sit turning bones to sonatas. Fingers blurred, I play what I know from listening to orchards unleash.”

— Ocean Vuong

116. “But when I turn around to see the panting boy, to forgive him, at last, for trying and failing to be good, there’s no one there.”

— Ocean Vuong

117. “We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.”

— Ocean Vuong

118. “She pain, the boy thought, mulling over her words. How can anyone be a feeling?”

— Ocean Vuong

119. “I am broken in two. Now I’m broken into.”

— Ocean Vuong

120. “A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.”

— Ocean Vuong

121. “There was something about the way he looked when lost in thought, his brow pinched under squinted eyes, giving his boyish face the harsh, hurt expression of someone watching his favorite dog being put down too soon.”

— Ocean Vuong

122. “I don’t know if I believe this but that’s what it felt like: As if we were to people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.”

— Ocean Vuong

123. “Then his eyelashes. You could hear them think.”

— Ocean Vuong

124. “To ask ‘What’s good?’ was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another.”

— Ocean Vuong

125. “What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?”

— Ocean Vuong

126. “I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room’s threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed.”

— Ocean Vuong

127. “If you find yourself trapped inside a dimming world, remember it was always this dark inside the body.”

— Ocean Vuong

128. “Woke up screaming with no sound. The room filling with a bluish water called dawn. Went to kiss grandma on the forehead just in case.”

— Ocean Vuong

129. “How some will call it shrapnel. And some will call it art.”

— Ocean Vuong

130. “I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner’s neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?”

— Ocean Vuong

131. “I remember it. I remember it all because how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful?”

— Ocean Vuong

132. “They say everything happens for a reason – but I can’t tell you why the dead always outnumber the living.”

— Ocean Vuong

133. “I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication.”

— Ocean Vuong

134. “I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else. To be a dam for damage. My shittyness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero.”

— Ocean Vuong

135. “In this way, the placenta is a kind of language – perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue.”

— Ocean Vuong

136. “The whole point of us meeting was to say goodbye, or rather, just to be side by side, a farewell of presence, of proximity, the way men are supposed to do.”

— Ocean Vuong

137. “Is there a language for falling out of language?”

— Ocean Vuong

138. “How come the past tense is always longer?”

— Ocean Vuong

139. “I love the world most when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere.”

— Ocean Vuong

140. “Shifts in the narrative would occur – the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”

— Ocean Vuong

141. “Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.”

— Ocean Vuong

142. “All this time I told myself we were born from war – but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence – but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

— Ocean Vuong

143. “I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck – the pieces floating, finally legible.”

— Ocean Vuong

144. “They say the is sky is blue but I know it’s black seen through too much air. You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most.”

— Ocean Vuong

145. “It’s a beautiful country, she’s been told, depending on who you are.”

— Ocean Vuong

146. “We live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we’ve been through.”

— Ocean Vuong

147. “Hey,” he said, half-asleep, “what were you before you met me?” “I think I was drowning.” A pause. “And what are you now?” he whispered, sinking. I thought for a second. “Water.”

— Ocean Vuong

148. “I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112 lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. 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

149. “He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.”

— Ocean Vuong

150. “No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely? The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.”

— Ocean Vuong