1. “Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need sorcery to make it out of here.” – Ocean Vuong
2. “To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.” – Ocean Vuong
3. “Because this body is my last address.” – Ocean Vuong
4. “He was white. I was yellow. In the dark, our facts lit us up and our acts pinned us down.” – Ocean Vuong
5. “how can there be a private space if there is no safe space,” – Ocean Vuong
6. “You feel for your throat because history has proven the skull lodged in the gravedigger’s hands is often the one behind your face.” – Ocean Vuong
7. “My people made a rhythm this way. A way.” – Ocean Vuong
8. “Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence – but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.” – Ocean Vuong
9. “What are we if not what the light says we are?” – Ocean Vuong
10. “The most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on.” – Ocean Vuong
11. “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.” – Ocean Vuong
12. “The city is so white it is ready for ink.” – Ocean Vuong
13. “Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?” – Ocean Vuong
14. “Everything good is always somewhere else.” – Ocean Vuong
15. “Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.” – Ocean Vuong
16. “Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.” – Ocean Vuong
17. “Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even. Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.” – Ocean Vuong
18. “Under my fingers, the stretch marks above his knees, on his shoulders, and the base of his spine shone silver and new. He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That’s what I wanted-not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger.” – Ocean Vuong
19. “What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher?” – Ocean Vuong
20. “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.” – Ocean Vuong
21. “Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.” – Ocean Vuong
22. “Underneath the grid is a field – it was always there – where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.” – Ocean Vuong
23. “Because this mess I made I made with love. Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured. Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.” – Ocean Vuong
24. “The truth is my recklessness is body-width.” – Ocean Vuong
25. “I miss you more than I remember you.” – Ocean Vuong
26. “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.” – Ocean Vuong
27. “Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.” – Ocean Vuong
28. “You are something made, then made to survive – which means you are somebody’s son.” – Ocean Vuong
29. “Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?” – Ocean Vuong
30. “What is a country but a life sentence?” – Ocean Vuong
31. “I did not know then what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another.” – Ocean Vuong
32. “The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.” – Ocean Vuong
33. “Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?” – Ocean Vuong
34. “For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense – that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.” – Ocean Vuong
35. “Note to self: If a guy tells you his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac, there’s a very good chance he’s a douchebag.” – Ocean Vuong
36. “I never want to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve theses, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” – Ocean Vuong
37. “Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing.” – Ocean Vuong
38. “Because nothing could be taken from me, I thought, if I had already given it away.” – Ocean Vuong
39. “When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?” – Ocean Vuong
40. “They were little bells struck to singing, it seems, by air itself.” – Ocean Vuong
41. “The spine won’t remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement.” – Ocean Vuong
42. “If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous briefly.” – Ocean Vuong
43. “The truth is I’m worried they will get us before they get us.” – Ocean Vuong
44. “I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication.” – Ocean Vuong
45. “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.” – Ocean Vuong
46. “Woke up screaming with no sound. The room filling with a bluish water called dawn. Went to kiss grandma on the forehead just in case.” – Ocean Vuong
47. “How come each time my hand hurts me, they become more mine?” – Ocean Vuong
48. “I’m trying to stay clean but my hands are monsters who believe in magic.” – Ocean Vuong
49. “But let me see if – using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone – I can build you a center.” – Ocean Vuong
50. “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.” – Ocean Vuong
51. “Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.” – Ocean Vuong
52. “Every grain of rice you leave behind is one maggot you eat in hell.” – Ocean Vuong
53. “I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.” – Ocean Vuong
54. “Without moving your head, you look at me, the way a mother looks at anything – for too long.” – Ocean Vuong
55. “I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you.” – Ocean Vuong
56. “Your father is only your father until one of you forgets.” – Ocean Vuong
57. “And I wanted it, for his gaze to fix me to the world I felt only halfway inside of.” – Ocean Vuong
58. “Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.” – Ocean Vuong
59. “The cruelest walls are made of glass.” – Ocean Vuong
60. “We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.” – Ocean Vuong
61. “I remember it. I remember it all because how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful?” – Ocean Vuong
62. “I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you, to be invisible in order to be safe.” – Ocean Vuong
63. “A woman, a girl, a gun. This is an old story, one anyone can tell.” – Ocean Vuong
64. “To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.” – Ocean Vuong
65. “As the bus sped up, bits of the city whirled by like objects in a washing machine.” – Ocean Vuong
66. “It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.” – Ocean Vuong
67. “You were born, the woman thinks, because no one else was coming.” – Ocean Vuong
68. “They say the earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the music.” – Ocean Vuong
69. “What a terrible life, I think now, to have to move so fast just to stay in one place.” – Ocean Vuong
70. “Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season.” – Ocean Vuong
71. “Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. in which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be the third language that animates where the tongue falters.” – Ocean Vuong
72. “I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.” – Ocean Vuong
73. “Don’t we touch each other just to prove we’re still here?” – Ocean Vuong
74. “He closes his eyes. This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me. He stops crying.” – Ocean Vuong
75. “He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.” – Ocean Vuong
76. “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.” – Ocean Vuong
77. “You would tell them that the most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on.” – Ocean Vuong
78. “What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?” – Ocean Vuong
79. “Standing by the dirt road, not unlike the road Lan had once stood on nearly forty years earlier, an M-16 pointed at her nose as she held you, I wait until my grandpa’s voice, this retired tutor, vegan, and marijuana grower, this lover of maps and Camus, finishes his last words to his first love, then close the laptop.” – Ocean Vuong
80. “Everyone can forget us – as long as you remember.” – Ocean Vuong
81. “We are rare in goodness, and rarer still in joy.” – Ocean Vuong
82. “They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.” – Ocean Vuong
83. “A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper.” – Ocean Vuong
84. “It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter. We’ll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe.” – Ocean Vuong
85. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine Van Gogh singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into his cut ear & feeling peace.” – Ocean Vuong
86. “I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?” – Ocean Vuong
87. “I’m not high, officer, I just don’t believe in time.” – Ocean Vuong
88. “Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.” – Ocean Vuong
89. “I saw my baby, just a glimpse. A brownish blur on its way to the bin.” – Ocean Vuong
90. “The train barrels past them all, these towns I have come to know only by what leaves them, myself included.” – Ocean Vuong
91. “Under the covers, we made friction of each other and fiction of everything else.” – Ocean Vuong
92. “What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place.” – Ocean Vuong
93. “To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.” – Ocean Vuong
94. “The body was made soft to keep us from loneliness.” – Ocean Vuong
95. “Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it.” – Ocean Vuong
96. “How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer – only to pick up the pieces?” – Ocean Vuong
97. “We had been sailing – but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight.” – Ocean Vuong
98. “i could not speak so i wrote myself into silence” – Ocean Vuong
99. “Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time.” – Ocean Vuong
100. “But only a mother can walk with the weight of a second beating heart.” – Ocean Vuong
101. “You want to tell him it’s okay that the night is also a grave we climb out of.” – Ocean Vuong
102. “To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time.” – Ocean Vuong
103. “Show me how ruin makes a home out of hip bones.” – Ocean Vuong
104. “I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim – the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible.” – Ocean Vuong
105. “But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?” – Ocean Vuong
106. “What were we before we were we?” – Ocean Vuong
107. “Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.” – Ocean Vuong
108. “The strays beyond the railroad are barking, which means something, a rabbit or possum, has just slipped out of its life and into the world.” – Ocean Vuong
109. “I am broken in two. Now I’m broken into.” – Ocean Vuong
110. “But some nothing’s changed everything after them.” – Ocean Vuong
111. “How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.” – Ocean Vuong
112. “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.” – Ocean Vuong
113. “I’m not high, officer, I just don’t believe in time” – Ocean Vuong
114. “Why do all my books leave me empty-handed?” – Ocean Vuong
115. “Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.” – Ocean Vuong
116. “But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them.” – Ocean Vuong
117. “To say possessing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ to the body.” – Ocean Vuong
118. “No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue.” – Ocean Vuong
119. “They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent.” – Ocean Vuong
120. “Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances. That’s a lie but we live it. We live anyway.” – Ocean Vuong
121. “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” – Ocean Vuong
122. “They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it.” – Ocean Vuong
123. “If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.” – Ocean Vuong
124. “What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for body?” – Ocean Vuong
125. “How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives?” – Ocean Vuong
126. “Our hands empty except for our hands.” – Ocean Vuong
127. “As a rule, “little” is always smaller than “small.” Don’t ask me why.” – Ocean Vuong
128. “Destruction is not necessary for art. I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it. Why can’t the language of creativity be the language of regeneration?” – Ocean Vuong
129. “In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.” – Ocean Vuong
130. “Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone.” – Ocean Vuong
131. “I love the world most when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere.” – Ocean Vuong
132. “the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.” – Ocean Vuong
133. “Because the year is a distance we’ve traveled in circles.” – Ocean Vuong
134. “We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt think and skull-less.” – Ocean Vuong
135. “How could I have known, that by pressing this pen to paper, I was touching us back from extinction?” – Ocean Vuong
136. “I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you.” – Ocean Vuong
137. “I had never seen so much movement in sleep before – except in dogs who run in dreams none of us will ever know.” – Ocean Vuong
138. “There was something about the way he looked when lost in thought, his brow pinched under squinted eyes, giving his boyish face the harsh, hurt expression of someone watching his favorite dog being put down too soon.” – Ocean Vuong
139. “You’re so quiet you’re almost tomorrow.” – Ocean Vuong
140. “But when I turn around to see the panting boy, to forgive him, at last, for trying and failing to be good, there’s no one there.” – Ocean Vuong
141. “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.” – Ocean Vuong
142. “Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.” – Ocean Vuong
143. “You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most.” – Ocean Vuong