Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

303. “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

304. “Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

306. “Standing by the dirt road, not unlike the road Lan had once stood on nearly forty years earlier, an M-16 pointed at her nose as she held you, I wait until my grandpa’s voice, this retired tutor, vegan, and marijuana grower, this lover of maps and Camus, finishes his last words to his first love, then close the laptop.”

— Ocean Vuong

307. “Memory erases into music.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

310. “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

311. “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

312. “What were we before we were we?”

— Ocean Vuong

313. “The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, must tighten around a bullet to make it speak.”

— Ocean Vuong

314. “Under my fingers, the stretch marks above his knees, on his shoulders, and the base of his spine shone silver and new. 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.”

— Ocean Vuong

315. “When commencing his mass bombing campaign in North Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, then chief of staff of the US Air Force, said he planned on bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Ages.” To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time.”

— Ocean Vuong

316. “Sometimes, at night, the girl asleep, Lan stares into the dark, thinking of another world, one where a woman holds her daughter by the side of a road, a thumbnail moon hung in the clear air. A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.”

— Ocean Vuong

317. “It was a greyish Sunday. All morning the sky had threatened downpour. The kind of day, I had hoped, where the bond between two people might be decided on easily – the weather being so bleak we would see each other, you and I, with relief, a familiar face made more luminous than we had remembered in the backdrop of dreary light.”

— Ocean Vuong

318. “Phosphorescent streaks raked up the purple, light-polluted sky and shredded into huge explosions that reverberated through our apartment.”

— Ocean Vuong

319. “Show me how ruin makes a home out of hip bones.”

— Ocean Vuong

320. “To gaze at what pleases – a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw – is, in itself, replication – the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

322. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

324. “I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

327. “Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold.”

— Ocean Vuong

328. “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

329. “Even when you looked the part, your tongue outed you. One does not ‘pass’ in America, it seems, without English.”

— Ocean Vuong

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “It seemed the city had forgotten the time – or rather, forgotten time itself.”

— Ocean Vuong

334. “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 sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

336. “A mother’s love neglects pride the way fire neglects the cries of what it burns.”

— Ocean Vuong

337. “Whether we went to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”

— Ocean Vuong

338. “Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.”

— Ocean Vuong

339. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

341. “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

342. “My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.”

— Ocean Vuong

343. “I know you believe in reincarnation. I don’t know if I do but I hope it’s real. Because then maybe you’ll come back here next time around. Maybe you’ll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose, and you’ll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. 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

344. “Because this body is my last address.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

346. “There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him.”

— Ocean Vuong

347. “You were born, the woman thinks, because no one else was coming.”

— Ocean Vuong

348. “They will want you to succeed, but never more than them.”

— Ocean Vuong

349. “Because the year is a distance we’ve traveled in circles.”

— Ocean Vuong

350. “For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense – that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.”

— Ocean Vuong