Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended – she’s a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

107. “I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.”

— Ocean Vuong

108. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

110. “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

111. “I’m not with you ’cause I’m at war. Which is one way of saying it’s already February and the president wants to deport my friends. It’s hard to explain.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

119. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

121. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

123. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

125. “The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

127. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

134. “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

135. “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.”

— Ocean Vuong

136. “Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name – Lan – in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. From that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son. 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

137. “What have we become to each other if not what we’ve done to each other?”

— Ocean Vuong

138. “Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft, whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise over. Submission does not require elevation in order to control.”

— Ocean Vuong

139. “To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing.”

— Ocean Vuong

140. “What I know is that the nail salon is more than a place of work and workshop for beauty, it is also a place where our children are raised – a number of whom, like cousin Victor, will get asthma from years of breathing the noxious fumes into their still-developing lungs.”

— Ocean Vuong

141. “But some nothing’s changed everything after them.”

— Ocean Vuong

142. “I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?”

— Ocean Vuong

143. “Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it a friendship, I said to myself.”

— Ocean Vuong

144. “It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now – as Lan called to me, “Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

146. “I reread Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary yesterday, the book he wrote each day for a year after his mother’s death. I have known the body of my mother, he writes, sick and then dying. And that’s where I stopped. Where I decided to write to you. You who are still alive.”

— Ocean Vuong

147. “No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue.”

— Ocean Vuong

148. “If we ever make it to shore, he says, I will name our son after this water. I will learn to love a monster.”

— Ocean Vuong

149. “What were you before you met me?”

— Ocean Vuong

150. “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