Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are... To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

228. “Under the covers, we made friction of each other and fiction of everything else.”

— Ocean Vuong

229. “I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication.”

— Ocean Vuong

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

233. “Unlike your brother,” you said, “you were not born until we knew you’d live.”

— Ocean Vuong

234. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

236. “They will tell you that great writing “breaks free” from the political, thereby “transcending” the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They’ll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let’s see how it’s made, they’ll say – as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.”

— Ocean Vuong

237. “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

238. “I have theories I write down then erase and walk away from the desk. I put the kettle on and let the sound of boiling water change my mind.”

— Ocean Vuong

239. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

241. “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

242. “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

243. “But I remember the table anyway. It exists and does not exist. An inheritance assembled with bare mouths. And nouns. And ash. I remember the table as a shard embedded in the brain. How some will call it shrapnel. And some will call it art.”

— Ocean Vuong

244. “I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that’s what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them.”

— Ocean Vuong

245. “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

246. “I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air – and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.”

— Ocean Vuong

247. “Texas law, while prohibiting the murder of human beings, defined a human only as White, African American, or Mexican. The nameless yellow body was not considered human because it did not fit in a slot on a piece of paper.”

— Ocean Vuong

248. “Only when I utter the word do I realize that rose is also the past tense of rise. That in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. I say it as if it is the only answer to your question – as if a name is also a sound we can be found in. Where am I? Where am I? You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.”

— Ocean Vuong

249. “You are something made, then made to survive – which means you are somebody’s son.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong