Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma?”

— Ocean Vuong

352. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

356. “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

357. “A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

359. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

363. “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

364. “How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer – only to pick up the pieces?”

— Ocean Vuong

365. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

368. “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

369. “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

370. “I’m not high, officer, I just don’t believe in time.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

372. “How every lullaby began with wailing, as if pain could not exit the body any other way.”

— Ocean Vuong

373. “I wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

375. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

377. “We had decided, shortly after we met, because our friends were already dying from overdoses, to never tell each other goodbye or good night.”

— Ocean Vuong

378. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

380. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

383. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

385. “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

386. “How else to repay the boy who gave me my first pizza bagel but to become his shadow?”

— Ocean Vuong

387. “In his backyard, an empty dirt field beside a freeway overpass, I watched Trevor aim his .32 Winchester at a row of paint cans lined on an old park bench. I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.”

— Ocean Vuong

388. “I remember crawling to the table, how it was now a pile of soot, then dipping my fingers into it. My nails blackening with my country. My country dissolving on my tongue. I remember cupping the ash and writing the words live live live on the foreheads of the three women sitting in the room. How the ash eventually hardened into ink on a blank page. How there’s ash on this very page. How there’s enough for everyone.”

— Ocean Vuong

389. “What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

391. “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

392. “The truth is I came here hoping for a reason to stay.”

— Ocean Vuong

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

399. “It was the part where Eva pours gasoline on her drug-doomed son and lights the match in an act of love and mercy I hope to both be capable of – and never know.”

— Ocean Vuong

400. “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