202 Quotes by Ocean Vuong

What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a brach already weighted with ghosts.

You're a mother, Ma. You're also a monster. But so am I - which is why I can't turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god's loneliest creation and put you inside it. Look.

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.

What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?What is a country but a life sentence?

Don't we touch each other just to prove we're still here?

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.

Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation.

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.

That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.