Poetry Quote by Ocean Vuong — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“But why can't the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You're a killer. You came into that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I'm wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. "Good for you, man" a man once said to me at a party, "you're making a killing with poetry. You're knockin' em dead.”

“Some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt / the mind forgetting / the body's crime of living”

“What were you before you met me?”

“I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chain saw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. & so I learned—that a man in climax was the closest thing”

“Don't we touch each other just to prove we're still here?”

“i'm glad to be alive”

“Is this my dream, or the truth?”

“Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds”

“English:”

“The answer to our existence lies in existence itself.”

“Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”