Siobhan Feeney

“I'm sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I run thinking I will outpace it all, my will to change being stronger than my fear of living.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What I felt then, however, was not desire, but the coiled charge of its possibility, a feeling that emitted, it seemed, its own gravity, holding me in place.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous