202 Quotes by Ocean Vuong

It's in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do-- how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

It was everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow.

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.

Under the covers, we made friction of each other and fiction of everything else.

Sometimes, when I'm careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what's left of what you were given, until something changes – or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that – yes – your name is still attached to a living thing.

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.

What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.

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.

Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.