Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “He stands with one foot on the other, as if touching less of the basement meant he was less inside it. He closes his eyes. This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me. He stops crying.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

412. “I don’t know if it was him or me who shifted. But the space between us grew thinner and thinner.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

422. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

429. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

431. “Without moving your head, you look at me, the way a mother looks at anything – for too long.”

— Ocean Vuong

432. “The weight of the average placenta is roughly one and a half pounds. A disposable organ where nutrients, hormones, and waste are passed between mother and fetus. In this way, the placenta is a kind of language – perhaps our first one, our true mother tongue. At four or five months, my brother’s placenta was already fully developed. You two were speaking – in blood utterances.”

— Ocean Vuong

433. “The room is silent as a photograph.”

— Ocean Vuong

434. “I was seen – I who had seldom been seen by anyone.”

— Ocean Vuong

435. “I don’t know if you’re happy, Ma. I never asked.”

— Ocean Vuong

436. “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

437. “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

438. “I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us.”

— Ocean Vuong

439. “Young enough to believe nothing.”

— Ocean Vuong

440. “And because denial, fabrication – storytelling – was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong?”

— Ocean Vuong

441. “I didn’t know the cost of entering a song – was to lose your way back.”

— Ocean Vuong

442. “I needed this act to have an author, a consciousness held in a defined and culpable space. For once, I wanted, needed, an enemy.”

— Ocean Vuong

443. “The state, where people live, is a battleground state.”

— Ocean Vuong

444. “These towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included.”

— Ocean Vuong

445. “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.”

— Ocean Vuong

446. “Yes, the period in the sentence – it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.”

— Ocean Vuong

447. “I lay there in the dark, mouthing the words till he appears again – young and warm and enough.”

— Ocean Vuong

448. “Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth?”

— Ocean Vuong

449. “You feel for your throat because history has proven the skull lodged in the gravedigger’s hands is often the one behind your face.”

— Ocean Vuong

450. “The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included.”

— Ocean Vuong