Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I – which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creature and put you inside it. Look.”

— Ocean Vuong

152. “Everything good is always somewhere else.”

— Ocean Vuong

153. “There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words – but shades, penumbras.”

— Ocean Vuong

154. “How come each time my hand hurts me, they become more mine?”

— Ocean Vuong

155. “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.”

— Ocean Vuong

156. “Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.”

— Ocean Vuong

157. “But only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart.”

— Ocean Vuong

158. “Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time.”

— Ocean Vuong

159. “Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.”

— Ocean Vuong

160. “I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

162. “Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time – believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of.”

— Ocean Vuong

163. “Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?”

— Ocean Vuong

164. “Every grain of rice you leave behind is one maggot you eat in hell.”

— Ocean Vuong

165. “The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.”

— Ocean Vuong

166. “If you were god you would tell them to stop clapping. You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on. But you are not a god.”

— Ocean Vuong

167. “In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you.”

— Ocean Vuong

168. “Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?”

— Ocean Vuong

169. “It’s a beautiful country depending on were you look. It’s a beautiful country, depending on who you are.”

— Ocean Vuong

170. “Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.”

— Ocean Vuong

171. “Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been? Where have we been, Ma?”

— Ocean Vuong

172. “But let me see if – using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone – I can build you a center.”

— Ocean Vuong

173. “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother.”

— Ocean Vuong

174. “If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft – no matter how soft her skin is.”

— Ocean Vuong

175. “I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you – but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.”

— Ocean Vuong

176. “I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.”

— Ocean Vuong

177. “So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”

— Ocean Vuong

178. “To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.”

— Ocean Vuong

179. “Where, under the stars, we see at last what we’ve made of each other in the light of long-dead things – and call it good.”

— Ocean Vuong

180. “It only takes a single night of frost to kill off an entire generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.”

— Ocean Vuong

181. “To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”

— Ocean Vuong

182. “It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.”

— Ocean Vuong

183. “I didn’t know the cost of entering a song – was to lose your way back. So I entered. So I lost. I lost it all with my eyes wide open.”

— Ocean Vuong

184. “You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

186. “I got what I wanted – a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.”

— Ocean Vuong

187. “I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

190. “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. Why can’t the language of creativity be the language of regeneration?”

— Ocean Vuong

191. “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

192. “The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

194. “Don’t we touch each other just to prove we’re still here?”

— Ocean Vuong

195. “What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets?”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

197. “To say possessing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ to the body.”

— Ocean Vuong

198. “I read that parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children. Perhaps there is a monstrous origin to it, after all. Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.”

— Ocean Vuong

199. “They say the earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the music.”

— Ocean Vuong

200. “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 silent selves, more, more, more.”

— Ocean Vuong