Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “My son, even tomorrow you will have today. Don’t you know?”

— Ocean Vuong

353. “You want to tell him it’s okay that the night is also a grave we climb out of.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

358. “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

359. “The body was made soft to keep us from loneliness.”

— Ocean Vuong

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

366. “Eat’, she says. ‘Swallow. Your bruises are inside it now. Swallow and it won’t hurt anymore.’ And so he eats. He is eating still.”

— Ocean Vuong

367. “I was a boy, which meant I was a murderer of my childhood.”

— Ocean Vuong

368. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

370. “We leave the Dunkin’ Donuts heavier with what we know of each other.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

372. “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

373. “When our lips touched the day closed into a coffin. In the museum of the heart there are two headless people building a burning house.”

— Ocean Vuong

374. “I let the mirror hold those flaws – because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time.”

— Ocean Vuong

375. “Why do all my books leave me empty-handed?”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

378. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

380. “Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

382. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

384. “What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

386. “As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.”

— Ocean Vuong

387. “I think of those men who sweated, who joked and sang beside me in the endless tobacco.”

— Ocean Vuong

388. “Why they die themselves like that?” she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: “They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That’s all. They don’t know its a cliff.”

— Ocean Vuong

389. “Because nothing could be taken from me, I thought, if I had already given it away.”

— Ocean Vuong

390. “Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances. That’s a lie but we live it. We live anyway.”

— Ocean Vuong

391. “My people made a rhythm this way. A way.”

— Ocean Vuong

392. “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

393. “When we arrives in America in 1990, color was one of the first things we knew of yet knew nothing about.”

— Ocean Vuong

394. “Oh no. The sadness is intensifying. How rude.”

— Ocean Vuong

395. “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

396. “I caved and decided it will be joy from now on.”

— Ocean Vuong

397. “I saw my baby, just a glimpse. A brownish blur on its way to the bin.”

— Ocean Vuong

398. “And because I was six, I remember believing color was a kind of happiness – so I took the brightest shades in the crayon box and filled my sad cow with purple, orange, red, auburn, magenta, pewter, fuchsia, glittered grey, lime green.”

— Ocean Vuong

399. “Despite their vastly different paths, they found themselves transplants in a decadent and disorientating city besieged by bombing raids. It was in this familiar happenstance that they found refuge in each other.”

— Ocean Vuong

400. “He was regarding his petrified toes with an expression of fatigued bewilderment, as if he had just woken from a deep sleep only to find himself nailed red and forever to this world.”

— Ocean Vuong