Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing.”

— Ocean Vuong

252. “Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain’t that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.”

— Ocean Vuong

253. “I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck – the pieces floating, finally legible.”

— Ocean Vuong

254. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

260. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

262. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “Outside, the hummingbird’s whirring sounds almost like human breath. Its beak jabs into the pool of sugared water at the feeder’s base. What a terrible life, I think now, to have to move so fast just to stay in one place.”

— Ocean Vuong

268. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

281. “Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.”

— Ocean Vuong

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.”

— Ocean Vuong

286. “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

287. “In the Hartford I grew up in and the one you grow old in, we greet one another not with “Hello” or “How are you?” but by asking, our chins jabbing the air, “What’s good?”

— Ocean Vuong

288. “You and I, we were Americans until we opened our eyes.”

— Ocean Vuong

289. “Trevor who, after an asthma attack, said, hunched over and gasping, “I think I just deep-throated an invisible cock,” and we both cracked up like it wasn’t December and we weren’t under an overpass waiting out the rain on the way home from the needle exchange.”

— Ocean Vuong

290. “It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do – how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

292. “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

293. “Memory erases into music.”

— Ocean Vuong

294. “But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma?”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

296. “That’s what writing is, after all the nonsense, getting down so low the world offers a merciful new angle, a larger vision made of small things, the lint suddenly a huge sheet of fog exactly the size of your eyeball.”

— Ocean Vuong

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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