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“And if this is it, if this is all there is, just means the trees a the sky and the seas, I know now that that’s enough.”

“I don’t need any words or looks or comments from a man to believe I’m visible; to believe I’m here. I don’t need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeline. That’s not where I come alive.”

“You know that life isn’t happening elsewhere, it doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it? That’s what it was.”

Try out the recipe!

“Self-love first. Everything begins with you. Peace and joy can both be obtained without a relationship. A relationship is supposed to enhance everything you’ve cultivated on your own.”

“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence, but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

“Why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?”

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.”

“Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears.”

“It is you who will safe yourself because this is what you’ve always done because you are strong enough to do so”

“We find time to waste remembering the faces we struggle to erase”

“Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.”

“To live fully we need to let go of our fear of dying”

“We cannot embrace the stranger with love forever fear the stranger”

“Anyone that does not know love is still in death”

“Sometimes you are erased before you are given the chive of stating who you are.”

How powerful. The narrator declares something that it isn’t foreign to many Asian American, to be a translator for your family. To be the voice for your parents. So powerful, yet sad that narrator at such a young age had to carry this responsibility on his shoulder because if not him then who?

“At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then is no mother at all- but an orphan.”

First chapter in, I’m taken aback. Ocean vuong not only describes the childhood memories and trayma, both the good and bad. You want to dislike the mother for abusing her son but he also makes her human in the reader’s eye. I love the connection back to life and describe PTSD as a war inside of you.

“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. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”

“If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin.”

“The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return, only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?”

“I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves— but meekly echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.”

“We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

“If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love, it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.”

“The notion that we “fall in love,” that we lack choice and decision when choosing a partner because when the chemistry is present, when the clock is there, it just happens, it overwhelms, it takes control. This way of thinking about love seems to be especially useful for men who are socialized via patriarchal notions of masculinity to be out of touch with what they feel.”

“Despite their support of gender equality in the public sphere, privately, deep down, they still saw love as a woman’s issue. To them, a relationship was about finding someone to take care of their needs.”

It’s so important to note how even when men who call themselves liberal are still within holding the patriarchal values in the privacy of their relationships.

“One of the ironies of the culture of greed is that the people who profit the most from earnings they have not worked to attain are the most eager to insist that the poor and working classes can only values material resources attained through hard work.”

“Most people wish they could find love where they are, in the lives and relationships they have chosen, but they feel they lack useful strategies for maintaining these bonds.”