Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

203. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

205. “It’s late in the season – which means the winter roses, in full bloom along the national bank, are suicide notes.”

— Ocean Vuong

206. “I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.”

— Ocean Vuong

207. “If I nationed myself in the shadow of a colossal wave If only to hold on by opening – by kingdom come give me this one eighth day let me enter this nearly-gone yes the way death enters anything fully without a trace.”

— Ocean Vuong

208. “And above that, his eyes: their grey irises smattered with bits of brown and ember so that, looking at them, you could almost see, right behind you, something burning under an overcast sky. It seemed the boy was always looking at a plane wrecking itself midair. That’s what I saw that first day. And although I knew that nothing behind me was on fire, I turned back anyway and saw the coiled summer air, sputtering with heat, rise over the razed fields.”

— Ocean Vuong

209. “It is a beautiful country depending on where you look.”

— Ocean Vuong

210. “The fluorescent hums steady above them, as if the scene is a dream the light is having.”

— Ocean Vuong

211. “And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can go through again and again, each time entering the same room?”

— Ocean Vuong

212. “Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns into gold. Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow. Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.”

— Ocean Vuong

213. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

215. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

217. “I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim – the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

219. “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

220. “I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”

— Ocean Vuong

221. “The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”

— Ocean Vuong

222. “You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came int o that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wresting with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience.”

— Ocean Vuong

223. “And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of.”

— Ocean Vuong

224. “It must suck to be the sun, though. Cause you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky. Like you don’t even know if you’re round or square or even if you’re guly or not. Like you can only see what you do to earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.”

— Ocean Vuong

225. “What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence – it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.”

— Ocean Vuong

226. “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

227. “What were we before we met? We must have been standing by the shoulder of a dirt road while the city burned. We must have been disappearing, like we are now.”

— Ocean Vuong

228. “How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives?”

— Ocean Vuong

229. “You’re so quiet you’re almost tomorrow.”

— Ocean Vuong

230. “And maybe it was there in the barn that I first saw what I would always see when flesh is pressed against the dark. How the sharper edges of his body – shoulders, elbows, chin, and nose – poked through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface.”

— Ocean Vuong

231. “I had never seen so much movement in sleep before – except in dogs who run in dreams none of us will ever know.”

— Ocean Vuong

232. “Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they’re wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.”

— Ocean Vuong

233. “Because this mess I made I made with love. Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured. Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.”

— Ocean Vuong

234. “Your father is only your father until one of you forgets.”

— Ocean Vuong

235. “Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely?”

— Ocean Vuong

236. “And because I am your son, I said, “Sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology had become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.”

— Ocean Vuong

237. “He closes his eyes. This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me. He stops crying.”

— Ocean Vuong

238. “Say autumn despite the green in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with falling. I.”

— Ocean Vuong

239. “How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet. Water whittled down to intention. Intention into nourishment. Everyone can forget us-as long as you remember.”

— Ocean Vuong

240. “What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?”

— Ocean Vuong

241. “I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, therefore yours.”

— Ocean Vuong

242. “If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous briefly.”

— Ocean Vuong

243. “Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”

— Ocean Vuong

244. “It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter. We’ll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe.”

— Ocean Vuong

245. “I never want to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve theses, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.”

— Ocean Vuong

246. “But the price of confessing, I learned, was that you get an answer.”

— Ocean Vuong

247. “I’m trying to stay clean but my hands are monsters who believe in magic.”

— Ocean Vuong

248. “I was seen – I who was seldom seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe, who, in elementary school, was sent to the fifteen-minute time-out in the corner only to be found two hours later, when everyone was long gone and Mrs. Harding, eating lunch at her desk, peered over her macaroni salad and gasped, “My god! My god, I forgot you were still here! What are you still doing here?”

— Ocean Vuong

249. “I used to be a girl, Little Dog. You know?” “Okay, Grandma, I know – ” But she wasn’t listening. “I used to put a flower in my hair and walk in the sun. After big rain, I walk in the sun. The flower I put on my ear. So wet, so cool.” Her eyes drifted from me. “It’s a stupid thing.” She shook her head. “Stupid thing. To be a girl.”

— Ocean Vuong

250. “What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body?”

— Ocean Vuong