202 Quotes by Ocean Vuong

Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and it’s prey.

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

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.

Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to givethe body what it knowsit cannot keep. That this amber lightwhittled down by another waris all that pins my hand to your chest.

...the ability to recognize beauty is not a passive act of seeing but an active endeavor of self understanding ...

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.

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?

4:37 a.m. How come depression makes me feel more alive?