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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous QUOTES

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous QUOTES

1 " I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

3 " 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. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

4 " You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

5 " It's in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do-- how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

6 " I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

7 " I only have the nerve to tell you what comes after because the chance this letter finds you is slim -- the very impossibility of your reading this is all that makes my telling it possible. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

8 " Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

9 " They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it. But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma? "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

10 " If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

11 " ...bombing the Vietnamese 'back into the Stone Ages". To destroy a people, then, it to set them back in time. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

12 " The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.

The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.

...You and I, we were Americans until we opened our eyes...They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

13 " All this time I told myself we were born from war-- but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but for that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

14 " I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don't know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me? "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

15 " The say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It's the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

16 " Because he tasted like the river and maybe you were one wing away from sinking. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

17 " It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it? "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

18 " We sat there, passing it back and forth until my head felt think and skull-less. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

19 " I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.

...I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

20 " 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. "

― Ocean Vuong , On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous