15 Briefly Gorgeous Lines From Ocean Vuong
No. 13 Is My Favourite
Word for word, Ocean Vuong is one of the greatest writers I have come across.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the recently released, Time Is A Mother, is packed full of flavourful imagery and succulent sentences.
Here are 15 lines from Ocean Vuong that have made me put his books down and cry at how gorgeous they are.
How come the past tense is always longer?
How else do we return to ourselves but to fold
The page so it points to the good part
I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.
Our hands empty except for our hands.
Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows.
Everything good is always somewhere else.
I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.
Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?
In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ.
Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?
I miss you more than I remember you.
The room is silent as a photograph.
The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life.
- as if a name is also a sound we can be found in.
“What were you before you met me?"
"I think I was drowning"
"And what are you now?"
"Water”
I’m still afraid
of butterflies
how they move so much
like a heart
on fire.
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.
And English is his second language, all the more amazing. All prose remains poetry with Ocean Vuong. Fantasy question: What would happen if Ocean Vuoung and Amanda Gorman collaborated on a poem??