Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Perhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “It was an accident, my beauty revealed to me.”

— Ocean Vuong

361. “One does not “pass” in America, it seems, without English.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

364. “Maybe, like you, I was one of those people who loves the world most when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere.”

— Ocean Vuong

365. “How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet. Water whittled down to intention. Intention into nourishment. Everyone can forget us-as long as you remember.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

367. “Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

369. “The strays beyond the railroad are barking, which means something, a rabbit or possum, has just slipped out of its life and into the world.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

375. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

381. “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

382. “For sharing art and air with me.”

— Ocean Vuong

383. “Your hands are hideous – and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream.”

— Ocean Vuong

384. “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

385. “Cocaine, laced with oxycodone, makes everything fast and still at once, like when you’re on the train and, gazing across the fogged New England fields, at the brick Colt factory where cousin Victor works, you see its blackened smokestack – parallel to the train, like it’s following you, like where you’re from won’t let you off the hook. Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”

— Ocean Vuong

386. “Because what I did with my one short beautiful life – was lose it on a winning streak.”

— Ocean Vuong

387. “As the bus sped up, bits of the city whirled by like objects in a washing machine.”

— Ocean Vuong

388. “We crowded around her, hear the single deep inhale pull down her lungs, as if she was about to dive underwater, and then, that’s it – no exhale. She simply stills, like someone had pressed pause on a movie.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

390. “Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone.”

— Ocean Vuong

391. “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

392. “He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once.”

— Ocean Vuong

393. “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

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. “There are hands fluttering between the constellations, trying to hold on.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

397. “I looked at you hard, the way I had learned, by then, to look into the eyes of my bullies.”

— Ocean Vuong

398. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

400. “I remember studying my father’s letter and seeing a scatter of tiny black dots: the periods left untouched. A vernacular of silence. I remember thinking everyone I ever loved was a single black dot on a bright page.”

— Ocean Vuong