. > .'s Quotes

“In history class, Mr Marsden asked us to write about an interesting member of our family. I wrote what I knew about my father's upbringing in Jamaica, using a word himself used - anglocentric - to describe his schooling. When my essay was returned, anglocentric was circuled in red, an 'No Such Word' written in the margin. I was starting to understand that those in the centre didn't need the language to describe their privilege.”
― Hannah Lowe

“Sometimes I can be walking down the street, or riding a bus, and suddenly I see somebody who remind me of somebody I know back home, and I close my eyes and find myself thinking of the sea, or the taste of grafted mango, or the smell of saltfish frying, and then I come back to myself and open my eyes and realise where I am.”
― Caryl Phillips, In the Falling Snow

“Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only longing for a body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us towards each other. Why did I feel more myself reaching out for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?

His tongue tracing my ear: the green pulled through a blade of grass.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The truest ruins are not written down. The girl Grandma knew back in Go Cong, the one whose sandals were cut from the tires of a burned-out army jeep, who was erased by an air strike three weeks before the war ended--she's a ruin no one can point to. A ruin without location, like a language.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I remember how your eyes widened. I remember staring and staring at the end of your finger until, at last, an emerald blur ripened into realness. And I saw them. The birds. All of them. How they flourished like fruit as your mouth opened and closed and the words wouldn't stop coloring the trees. I remember forgetting the blood. I remember never looking down.
Yes, there was war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name- Lan- in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. For that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son.
All this time I told myself we were born from war- bit 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.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence—it’s what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.
Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft,
whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise
over.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous