Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

307. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

310. “Take a right on Risley. If you forget me, then you’ve gone too far. Turn back. Good luck. Good night. Good lord, Green Apple.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

312. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

315. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

317. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

319. “From then on, I would fill in our blanks, our silences, stutters, whenever I could. I code switched. I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

321. “Memory is a choice.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

323. “I’m writing you because I’m not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty-handed.”

— Ocean Vuong

324. “Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body?”

— Ocean Vuong

325. “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

326. “What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know.”

— Ocean Vuong

327. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

329. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

331. “We had been sailing – but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight.”

— Ocean Vuong

332. “In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down.”

— Ocean Vuong

333. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

339. “Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

345. “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

346. “Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.”

— Ocean Vuong

347. “On the screen, a tiny red Mario jumped from platform to platform. If Mario fell off, he would have to start the level over, from the beginning. This was also called dying.”

— Ocean Vuong

348. “And I let him run his mind. I let him empty. I didn’t stop him because you don’t stop nothing when you’re nine.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong