Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “What have we become to each other if not what we’ve done to each other?”

— Ocean Vuong

152. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

154. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “Everything good is always somewhere else.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

172. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

175. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

178. “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

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. “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

181. “Because no one stays long enough and someone is always just-gone. Because there are no salaries, health care, or contracts, the body being the only material to work with and work from. Having nothing, it becomes its own contract, a testimony of presence.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

183. “They are locked in boxes the size of themselves. A body-box, like a coffin, but alive, like a home. 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

184. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

186. “I think if Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “Monkeys, moose, cows, dogs, butterflies, buffaloes. What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story – when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.”

— Ocean Vuong

192. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

194. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

196. “Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.”

— Ocean Vuong

197. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong