Top 500 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

411. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

415. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

418. “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

419. “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

420. “With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy – but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated.”

— Ocean Vuong

421. “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

422. “When I examined the brushstrokes, I saw that they were not painted on at all, but printed on with speckled relief, suggesting a hand without enacting the real. The relief “strokes” never cohered with their shades, so that a stroke would hold two, even three colors at once. A fake. A fraud. Which was why I loved it.”

— Ocean Vuong

423. “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

424. “Who told me sunflowers were his favorite because they grew higher than people. Who ran his fingers so gently down their lengths I thought red blood pulsed inside the stalks.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

427. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

434. “At one point Hai opened the window to let the spring in, and it seemed to lift everyone inside, their heads leaning back to relish the sweet-scented flourish. Only in springtime, it seemed, does gravity work backward here, the dandelion pollen rising in great squalls, the flower buds shooting up, further from the ground, as if pulled by the sky’s sudden need for them, all of it under the crisp brilliance of April sunlight. Watching this, Hai felt himself displaced by a wild, untenable gratitude.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

441. “Look, I have it too. It’s just like the weather. Like clouds and rain and stuff. They go away. But some of us spend more time in London, you know? Or Seattle. You’re just raining right now.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

444. “People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

447. “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

448. “Where “a home,” like this one, is often a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer – including family – that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?”

— Ocean Vuong

449. “If you aim for Gladness and miss, you’ll find us. For we are called East Gladness. Gladness itself being no more, renamed to Millsap nearly a century ago after Tony Millsap, the boy who returned from the Great War with no limbs and became a hero – proof you could loose almost all of yourself in the country and still gain a whole town.”

— Ocean Vuong

450. “Listen here, this country,” she lowered her voice, “was purposefully built on war. The reptilians shape-shift into politicians and celebrities, then use these puppets to start wars so they never run out of bad energy to consume. Don’t you get it? War is fertilizer for their crops.”

— Ocean Vuong