Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

403. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

406. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

408. “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

409. “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

410. “Because my uncle never killed himself – but simply died, on purpose.”

— Ocean Vuong

411. “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

412. “And I let him run his mind. I let him empty. I didn’t stop him because you don’t stop nothing when you’re nine.”

— Ocean Vuong

413. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

416. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

418. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

427. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

429. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

434. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

436. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

438. “You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.”

— Ocean Vuong

439. “I lied – why I’m not quite sure. Maybe I wanted to give him the power of this small knowledge over me.”

— Ocean Vuong

440. “Note to self: If a guy tells you his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac, there’s a very good chance he’s a douchebag.”

— Ocean Vuong

441. “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.”

— Ocean Vuong

442. “How could I have known, that by pressing this pen to paper, I was touching us back from extinction?”

— Ocean Vuong

443. “In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

445. “The Hubble telescope swoops the other way. Halley’s Comet shoots back behind the trees as the Humvees roll, again, into Iraq.”

— Ocean Vuong

446. “We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt think and skull-less.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

448. “The city is so white it is ready for ink.”

— Ocean Vuong

449. “Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need sorcery to make it out of here.”

— Ocean Vuong

450. “I watch as two daughters car for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.”

— Ocean Vuong