Oddly

“You can walk away. You can be nothing & still breathing. Believe me.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

“What we’ll always have is something we lost”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“My favorite kind of darkness is the one inside us, I want to tell him. &: I like the way your apron makes it look like you’re ready for war. I too am ready for war. Given another chance, I’d pick the life where I play the piano in a room with no roof. Broken keys, Bach sonata like footsteps fast down the stairs as my father chases my mother through New England’s endless leaves. Maybe I saw a boy in a black apron crying in a Nissan the size of a monster’s coffin & knew I could never be straight. Maybe, like you, I was one of those people who loves the world most when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother