Reader > Reader's Quotes

“To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“tenderness depends on how little the world touches you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let me begin again.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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