Time Is a Mother Quotes

“How come the past tense is always longer?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I’ve
plagiarized my life
to give you the best
of me”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life
the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.
& I was free.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“What we’ll always have is something we lost”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“How you can love the world
until there’s nothing left to love
but yourself.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my
eyes, the word for love is Yêu.
And the word for weakness is Yếu.
How you say what you mean changes what you say.
Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns into gold. Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow. Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. I'm trying to be real but it costs too much.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Because this body is my last address.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“Because I, too,
needed a place
to hold me.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I’m still afraid
of butterflies
how they move so much
like a heart
on fire.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I'm back inside
my head
where it's safe.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“They say the earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the music.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“none of us are children long enough to love it”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“i could not speak so i wrote myself into silence”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“a loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call it Proof.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“my people my people
I thought
the fall would
kill me
but it only
made me real.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Because what I did with my one short beautiful life— was lose it on a winning streak.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“You can walk away. You can be nothing & still breathing. Believe me.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine Van Gogh singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into his cut ear & feeling peace.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need sorcery to make it out of here.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Oh no. The sadness is intensifying. How rude.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“If words, as they claimed, had no weight
in our world, why did we keep
sinking, Doctor—I mean
Lord—why did the water swallow
our almost human hands
as we sang?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“nobody's free without breaking open”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it. I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother