Quotessence
Home / Authors / Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllChildhoodMotherhoodMemoirPoetryIdentityBeautyImmigrationBiographyFictionLoveLifeAdulthoodSadnessSexWritingDeathGayNostalgiaOcean VuongDrugs

Famous Ocean Vuong Quotes

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly. Once, after my fourteenth birthday, crouched between the seats of an abandoned school bus in the woods, I filled my life with a line of cocaine. A white letter “I” glowed on the seat’s peeling leather. Inside me the “I” became a switchblade— and something tore. My stomach forced up but it was too late. In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.”

DrugsCocaineCoke
Book:On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Create image

“Cocaine, laced with oxycodone, makes everything fast and still at once, like when you’re on the train and, gazing across the fogged New England fields, at the brick Colt factory where cousin Victor works, you see its blackened smokestack— parallel to the train, like it’s following you, like where you’re from won’t let you off the hook. Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”

LifeDrugsCocaineCokeOxycontinOxycodone
Book:On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Create image