Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “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

302. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

304. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

306. “Although it’s only three in the morning, the lampshade makes the room feel like the last moments of a sinister sunset. Under the bulb’s electric hum, Paul and I spot each through the doorway. He wipes his eyes with the palm of one hand and waves me over with the other.”

— Ocean Vuong

307. “Spilled orange juice all over the table this morning. Sudden sunlight I couldn’t wipe away.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

312. “You get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side-waiting.”

— Ocean Vuong

313. “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

314. “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

315. “Milkflower petals on a black dog like pieces of a girl’s dress.”

— Ocean Vuong

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

320. “What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher?”

— Ocean Vuong

321. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “He was white. I was yellow. In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

329. “Memory erases into music.”

— Ocean Vuong

330. “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

331. “But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them.”

— Ocean Vuong

332. “Memory is a choice.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

336. “It was 2006 or 1865 or .327. What a time to be alive! they said, this time louder, more assault rifles.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

346. “You asked me what it’s like to be a writer and I’m giving you a mess, I know. But it’s a mess, Ma – I’m not making this up. I made it down. That’s what writing is, after all the nonsense, getting down so low the world offers are 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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

349. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong