“Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?”
“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”
“Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?”
“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
“How could I tell you that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?”
“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin.”
“What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.”
“To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched-and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield.”
“My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.”
“I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salved and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.”
“I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was.”
“A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be in American bones-with or without citizenship-aching, toxic, and underpaid.”
“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.”
“That’s what I wanted -not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger.”
“I want to insist that our 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?”
“To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”
“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.”
“They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
“I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living.”
-On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong