Best 29 quotes of Ocean Vuong on MyQuotes

All this time I told myself we were born from war-- but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but for that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.

All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.

A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.

A pillaged village is a fine example of a perfect rhyme. He said that. He was white. Or maybe, I was just beside myself, next to him. Either way, I forgot his name by heart.

Because he tasted like the river and maybe you were one wing away from sinking.

Because something in him know she'd be there. That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

But why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You're a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I'm wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. "Good for you, man" a man once said to me at a party, "you're making a killing with poetry. You're knockin' em dead.

God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning her garden. My footsteps on the sidewalk were the smallest flights. Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here. Here. That's all I wanted to be. I promise.

Grandma said In the war they would grab a baby, a soldier at each ankle, and pull... Just like that. It's finally spring! Daffodils everywhere. Just like that.

He dies at the party where everyone laughs & all you want is to go into the kitchen & make seven omelets before burning down the house.

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. " I don't understand why they would do that. Can't they see it's a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that." I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you - but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won't finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.

I didn't know that would be the last time I'd see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner's neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

I don't know if I believe this but that's what it felt like: As if we were to people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.

I looked between my legs and saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what it always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again... To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That's what I was.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.

I remember how your eyes widened. I remember staring and staring at the end of your finger until, at last, an emerald blur ripened into realness. And I saw them. The birds. All of them. How they flourished like fruit as your mouth opened and closed and the words wouldn't stop coloring the trees. I remember forgetting the blood. I remember never looking down. Yes, there was war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name- Lan- in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. For that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son. All this time I told myself we were born from war- bit I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence- but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.

I thought sex was to breach new ground, despite terror, that as long as the world did not see us, its rules did not apply. But I was wrong. The rules, they were already inside us.

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

It’s the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don’t get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, “it’s been an honor to serve my country.” The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine? It’s like when all you’ve been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there’ll be another cliff on the other side. 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.

Maybe in the next life we'll meet each other for the first time- believing in everything but the harm we're capable of. Maybe we'll be the opposite of buffaloes. We'll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple. Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they're wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips. Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field- it was always there- where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more. As a rule, be more. As a rule, I miss you. As a rule,"little" is always smaller than "small". Don't ask me why. I'm sorry I don't call enough. Green Apple. I'm sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?

No, madam,' I said to the woman in my ESL English. "That's my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I'm doing fine."... You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers adn sons, is considered taboo- so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say,'This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole!

Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man staggers forth, his cane tapping lightly own the aisle. He leans against the door, raises a violin to chin, and says I’m sorry to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen. And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like music should be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover, inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo seeps through our skin like warm water, we who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching. Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roses on the instrument. His head swooning to each chord exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me has put down her book, closed her eyes, the baby has stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws will always open to swallow a smile already lost. How insufficient the memory, to fail before death. how will hear these notes when the train slides into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song lingers with breaths rising from empty seats? I know I am too human to praise what is fading. But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills completely with warm water, and we are all swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart flowing from his hands. I want nothing but to put my fingers inside his mouth, let that prayer hum through my veins. I want crawl into the hole in his violin. I want to sleep there until my flesh becomes music.

Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.

The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.

You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.