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

“What were you before you met me?”

“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”

“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.”

“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn into anything big or grand, that's the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don't you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that's enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light?" [...] "People don't know what's enough, Labas. That's their problem. They think they suffer, but they're really just bored. They don't eat enough carrots.”

“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”

“I will come back to you, I swear I will;”

“Dark is the world’s night without you my love,”

“مَن ثبّت قلبي في جسد الليلْ؟”

“J'ai cueilli ce brin de bruyère”

“And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.”

“Heart, we will forget him!”