Top 500 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

254. “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

255. “What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?”

— Ocean Vuong

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

261. “But for now, the city brims before us with a strange, rare brilliance – as if it was not a city at all, but the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapon above us.”

— Ocean Vuong

262. “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

263. “For sharing art and air with me.”

— Ocean Vuong

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “Despite my vocabulary, my books, knowledge, I find myself folded against the far wall, bereft. I watch two daughters care for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at least, teach me how to touch my dead.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

271. “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

272. “Cigarettes spark in the dark: fireflies in a bomb shelter.”

— Ocean Vuong

273. “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

274. “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

275. “I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence – I was trying to break free.”

— Ocean Vuong

276. “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

277. “Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes – or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing.”

— Ocean Vuong

278. “And like a word, I hold no weight in this world yet still carry my own life.”

— Ocean Vuong

279. “They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it.”

— Ocean Vuong

280. “Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.”

— Ocean Vuong

281. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

283. “Yes. You’re both happy,” I answered, knowing nothing. “You’re both happy, Ma. Yes,” I said again. Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail – or whatever you want to call your god – should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?”

— Ocean Vuong

284. “I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, a Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That’s what I was.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

287. “Because my uncle never killed himself – but simply died, on purpose.”

— Ocean Vuong

288. “I guess what I mean is that I ate the apple not because the man lied when he said I was born of his rib but that I wanted to fill myself with its hunger for the ground, where the bones of my people still dream of me.”

— Ocean Vuong

289. “The piano drips its little notes, like rain dreaming itself whole.”

— Ocean Vuong

290. “Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all – but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”

— Ocean Vuong

291. “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

292. “I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

294. “Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.”

— Ocean Vuong

295. “Whoever prays the dawn prayer in congregation’, said the prophet Muhammad, ‘It is as if he had prayed the whole night long!”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

298. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

300. “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