You ever read something so beautiful it lowkey ruins your day because now you’re just sitting there… feeling things? Yeah. That was me after I read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous didn’t just give me beautiful lines, it gave me permission to pause. To reflect. To crumble a little. And maybe… rebuild softer. This wasn’t just a book. It was a long, quiet letter that turned into a mirror. It was one of those books where the stories are the life — messy, aching, and unspeakably gorgeous in their pain.
Ocean Vuong’s words had a way of crawling under my skin and leaving me emotionally compromised in the best way.
Below are the quotes that hit me the hardest — the kind that made me underline them and stare into a blank space for five minutes.
1.
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 merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.
2.
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.
3.
Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.
4.
Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.
5.
I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world, not as myself but as an echo of who I was.
6.
When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere, Ma. Even when I know something to be true as bone I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not despite my writing it, stay real.
7.
Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.
…
And because I am your son, I said, “Sorry.” Because I am your son, my apology has become, by then, an extension of myself. It was my Hello.
8.
Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?
9.
Inside a single-use life, there are no second chances. That’s a lie but we live it. We live anyway.
10.
Maybe we look into mirrors not merely to seek beauty, regardless how illusive, but to make sure, despite the facts, that we are still here. That the hunted body we move in has not yet been annihilated, scraped out. To see yourself still yourself is a refuge that men who have not been denied cannot know.
11.
I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw – is in itself, a replication – the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last.
12.
In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.
13.
They say nothing lasts forever but they are just scared it will last longer than they can love it.
14.
We try to preserve life – even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.
15.
I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.
I still don’t know how to fully describe what this book did to me — maybe I don’t need to. Maybe that’s the whole point.
Each pause between words was a breath I didn’t know I was holding. And that made me realize that sometimes, we carry words not because they explain us, but because they echo us.
And these quotes? They are bits of emotional damage that I’ll keep returning to on quiet nights when I need loud, intrusive thoughts to prevail. Whenever I need to be reminded that even in brief moments, we’re allowed to be gorgeous.
With a soft sigh,
Ritika Das @ Readablyours
