Author: Ocean Vuong
notes
- I love how he intertwines tenderness with violence to create contrast and highlight the realities of abuse
- Beautiful sentences convey metaphysical imagery.
- The author’s writing style has such a unique, cinematic quality.
- I am so lucky to be born with a privilege as I have and not to have seen such suffering in my childhood. I won’t take it for granted. This is a reality I’ve never even considered before
- The prose is like a slow motion film, capturing a harsh reality through a bittersweet and beautiful lens.
- Subordination of the self. Reduction of the ego to survive.
- Sex like it’s precious, what it feels like to be seen.
With each slam, a light turned on and off inside me. I flickered, like a bulb in a storm, seeking myself in his steering. – 118
The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma. – 24
Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears. – 77
- Guns are a manifestation of humanity’s ugliest facet.
But by writing, I mar it. I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once. – 85
- To write is to build and demolish.
What I felt then, however, was not desired, but the coiled charge of possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, it’s own gravity, holding me in place. – 96
I remember it all because how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful? – 107
To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. – 119
But for now, the city brims before us with a strange, rare brilliance – as if it was not a city at all, but the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapons above us. – 151
Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to know places. Under the grid as a field — it was always there — where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more. – 192
What’s Simone Weil said: Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object, no corner is left for saying ‘I’ … as if we were two people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying ‘I’. – 202
To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted. – 238
Your hands are hideous — and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. – 79
- To be beautiful and to be seen. Exploring the essence and meaning of existence. Survival, tenderness, love, purple days, loss.
- ==After reading this, I think bell hooks’s definition of love lacks nuance. Yes, love is empathy without judgment, but that removes it so far from what it is, it creates and destroys through syntax. How to love, sure, but what it is? That’s a personal journey even a definition cannot define.==
- Life like a firefly, a butterfly dream. Freedom, restraint, escape, fighting, living to live.