Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

253. “Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even. Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.”

— Ocean Vuong

254. “It was everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow.”

— Ocean Vuong

255. “Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response.”

— Ocean Vuong

256. “The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, damnit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for?”

— Ocean Vuong

257. “This also means nothing. I know. But some nothings change everything after them.”

— Ocean Vuong

258. “Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.”

— Ocean Vuong

259. “They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it. But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma?”

— Ocean Vuong

260. “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

261. “Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me stay young, get this snow off of my life – get it all off my life.” I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us.”

— Ocean Vuong

262. “As a rule, “little” is always smaller than “small.” Don’t ask me why.”

— Ocean Vuong

263. “The body, it fills up. And your thirst overflows what holds it. And your ruin, you thought it would nourish him. That he would feast on it and grow into a beast you could hide in.”

— Ocean Vuong

264. “It wasn’t me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother’s womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around.”

— Ocean Vuong

265. “I stared at my feet, at the shoes you bought me, the ones with red lights that flashed on the soles when I walked. My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.”

— Ocean Vuong

266. “A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones – with or without citizenship – aching, toxic, and underpaid.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

269. “They say the is sky is blue but I know it’s black seen through too much air. You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most.”

— Ocean Vuong

270. “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

271. “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

272. “It’s a beautiful country, she’s been told, depending on who you are.”

— Ocean Vuong

273. “They were little bells struck to singing, it seems, by air itself.”

— Ocean Vuong

274. “The engine starts, the car lurches into a U-turn. As we pull away, from the porch, a boy, no older than I am, points a toy pistol at us. The gun jumps and his mouth makes blasting noises. His father turns to yell at him. He shoots once, two more times. From the window of my helicopter, I look at him. I look him dead in the eyes and do what you do. I refuse to die.”

— Ocean Vuong

275. “For a while you said nothing, then started to hum the melody to “Happy Birthday.” It was not my birthday but it was the only song you knew in English, and you kept going. And I listened, the phone pressed so hard to my ear that, hours later, a pink rectangle was still imprinted on my cheek.”

— Ocean Vuong

276. “Underneath the grid is a field – it was always there – where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.”

— Ocean Vuong

277. “Who told me sunflowers were his favorite because they grew higher than people.”

— Ocean Vuong

278. “A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations. I made out people, verbs, abstractions, ideas with my fingers, my arms, and by drawing in the dirt.”

— Ocean Vuong

279. “Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing.”

— Ocean Vuong

280. “I want to believe, walking those aimless nights, that I was praying. For what I’m still not sure. But I always felt it was just ahead of me. That if I walked far enough, long enough, I would find it – perhaps even hold it up, like a tongue at the end of its word.”

— Ocean Vuong

281. “The spine won’t remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement.”

— Ocean Vuong

282. “What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for?”

— Ocean Vuong

283. “He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That’s what I wanted – not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger... as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to. And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can through again and again entering the same room?”

— Ocean Vuong

284. “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

285. “We are rare in goodness, and rarer still in joy.”

— Ocean Vuong

286. “There are no animals here but us.”

— Ocean Vuong

287. “You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on.”

— Ocean Vuong

288. “Maybe then, in that life and in this future, you’ll find this book and you’ll know what happened to us. And you’ll remember me. Maybe.”

— Ocean Vuong

289. “Like you don’t even know if you’re round or square or even if you’re ugly or not.′ I continued. I wanted it to sound important, urgent – but had no idea if I believed it. ‘Like you can only see what you do to the earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.”

— Ocean Vuong

290. “Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to.”

— Ocean Vuong

291. “When I asked you, “Why coloring, why now?” you put down the sapphire pencil and stared, dreamlike, at a half-finished garden.”

— Ocean Vuong

292. “The truth is my recklessness is body-width.”

— Ocean Vuong

293. “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

294. “We live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we’ve been through.”

— Ocean Vuong

295. “Memory is a choice.”

— Ocean Vuong

296. “Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

298. “It was dark enough for my eyes to swallow all of him without ever seeing him clearly. Like eating with the lights off – it still nourished even if you didn’t know where your body ends.”

— Ocean Vuong

299. “You once asked me what it means to be a writer. So here goes. Seven of my friends are dead. Four from overdoses. Five, if you count Xavier who flipped his Nissan doing ninety on a bad batch of fentanyl. I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong