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

“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

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