Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

154. “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

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. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

162. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

165. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

182. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

184. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

186. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

188. “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

189. “What we’ll always have is something we lost.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

192. “They say every snowflake is different – but the blizzard, it covers us all the same.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

196. “A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.”

— Ocean Vuong

197. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

199. “We are lucky, the end of a sentence is where we might begin.”

— Ocean Vuong

200. “You always tell me it’s too late for you to read... you’d just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost.”

— Ocean Vuong