Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is an American poet, essayist, and writer born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, on October 14, 1988.
Vuong later became a United States citizen and attended Glastonbury High School before pursuing higher education at Brooklyn College and subsequently at New York University. Alongside his writing, he holds a position as a university teacher. He works in both English and Vietnamese.
Among his notable works is On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. His writing has been recognized through a range of awards and fellowships, including the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, and the MacArthur Fellows Program award. Earlier in his career he also received the Kundiman Fellowship and the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.
Vuong's work spans poetry and the essay form, and his practice as a poet and essayist writing in English and Vietnamese marks a consistent thread running through his career as a writer and university teacher.
Quotes by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong's insights on:
Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.
What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day – neither good or bad, but something we passed through.
Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.
The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run. The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.
If you find yourself trapped inside a dimming world, remember it was always this dark inside the body. Where the heart, like any law, stops only for the living.