5 Quotes by Ocean Vuong That Make You Rethink Writing and Language

From the mind behind On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Photo by Christopher Ho @ KCRW

Ocean Vuong is an award-winning poet and author who brought us the masterpieces called On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Night Sky With Exit Wounds. In a previous article, I mentioned that the prior was the novel that made me continue writing. Ocean Vuong, ultimately, is my writing mentor and inspiration.

Consequently, I’d want more people to know about him and be benefited from his writing. So here are 5 quotes by Ocean Vuong that will make you rethink writing and language, taken from his first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and his interview with On Being.

“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.”

This excerpt from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was the reason why I bought this book right away. I was stunned by Ocean Vuong’s incredible language mastery. The way he uses English so poetically, beautifully, and skillfully inspires me to keep learning until, ideally, I reach his level of fluency.

And I thought it is remarkable when someone’s words can move someone else and make them feel emotions they were never able to call out.

This led us to the second quote.

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”

The quote sums up the miracle of writing.

Writing is an underrated and overcomplicated form of art. Writers, or artists, are often pressured into the idea of originality that they often forget the exceptionality of their own stories.