Ocean Vuong Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation is not another ‘bipolar episode’ but something I fought hard for? Maybe I jump up and down and kiss you too hard on the neck when I learn, upon coming home, that it’s pizza night because sometimes pizza night is more than enough, is my most faithful and feeble beacon. What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine? ...What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

2. What were you before you met me?""I think I was drowning""And what are you now?""Water On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

3. [T]heories are for people with too much time and not enough determination. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

4. A flower is seen only toward the end of its life, just-bloomed and already on its way to being brown paper. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

5. A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

6. By then, violence was already mundane to me, was what I knew, ultimately, of love. Fuck. Me. Up. It felt good to name what was already happening to me all my life. I was being fucked up, at last, by choice. ...Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

7. Don't we touch each other just to prove we're still here? Night Sky with Exit Wounds

8. 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. Night Sky with Exit Wounds

9. 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...as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to. And what do you do to a boy like that but turn yourself into a doorway, a place he can through again and again entering the same room? On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

10. I fucking hate my dad."Up until then I didn't think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that's what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

11. I got what I wanted -- a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

12. I wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

13. I'm broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

14. If we ever make it to shore, he says, I will name our son after this water. I will learn to love a monster Night Sky with Exit Wounds

15. Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time — believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of. Maybe we’ll be the opposite of buffaloes. We’ll grow wings, and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. ...You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

16. Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt / the mind forgetting / the body's crime of living Night Sky with Exit Wounds

17. Some one said history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

18. 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. Night Sky with Exit Wounds

19. The most beautiful part of your bodyis where it’s headed. & remember,loneliness is still time spentwith the world.

20. What were you before you met me?""I think I was drowning""And what are you now?""Water On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

21. Who told me sunflowers were his favorite because they grew higher than people. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous