“… come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”

"I am homesick for a place I am not sure even exists. One where my heart is full. My body loved. And my soul understood."

"I want to go home. I will always want to go home. Even when I am at home I want to go home. But I'm not really thinking of a place, it's more that feeling of everything finally being over, of seeing the light in the windows of your house on a cold night, of being safe, the relief of leaving a party you're not enjoying, like when you felt sick at school and they sent you home, or when you got upset at a sleepover and they called your parents. I want my mam to come get me. I want to go home."

“Have you ever noticed when you’re tired, your fingers don’t grip things as tightly as they should? That things slip through them more often than you wish? I feel as though I am those fingers and life is slipping through me.”

“When I think of you now, this is what I remember: That honest stories all end strangely.”

[Text ID:

“She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.”

[image id: partial transcript of the {interview} "survival as a creative force: an interview with ocean vuong" uploaded on june 9, 2019 featuring ocean vuong that reads:

“The more I understand of myself and the more I understand of the temperament of those artists whom I admire, the more I am convinced that what separates talent from genius is nothing more nor less than confidence: the ability not to be frightened of making a fool of yourself. This is a dangerous thing to say. It opens the door to sheer bravura. But that is a very different thing from the kind of confidence I am talking about. Bravura comes from the desire to impress which in turn comes from the same fear of making a fool of yourself. The confidence I speak of is not made out of the opinions of others. It comes from solitude.”