Top 450 Ocean Vuong Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “When commencing his mass bombing campaign in North Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, then chief of staff of the US Air Force, said he planned on bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Ages.” To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time.”

— 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. “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

405. “Whether we went to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

408. “Because the year is a distance we’ve traveled in circles.”

— Ocean Vuong

409. “For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense – that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.”

— Ocean Vuong

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

419. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

424. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

426. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

433. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

441. “As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

443. “I said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth.”

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

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

— Ocean Vuong

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

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

— Ocean Vuong

450. “Young enough to believe nothing.”

— Ocean Vuong