On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Metadata
Highlights
- I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey. (Location 143)
- It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing. (Location 150)
- To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger. (Location 159)
- our breaths floating above us, the makeup drying on your face. Our hands empty except for our hands. (Location 196)
- If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast. (Location 227)
- When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind? (Location 246)
- 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.” (Location 252)
- What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts. (Location 257)
- To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once. (Location 262)
- You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it. Look. (Location 277)
- But it was stillness, I realize now, that I sought, not of her body, which kept ticking as she slept, but of her mind. Only in this twitching quiet did her brain, wild and explosive during waking hours, cool itself into something like calm. (Location 291)
- To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield. (Location 317)
- I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us. (Location 383)
- mauve with early dark: (Location 387)
- Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows. (Location 403)
- My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere. (Location 409)
- I’d drink it down, gulping, making sure you could see, both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy. I’m drinking light, I thought. I’m filling myself with light. The milk would erase all the dark inside me with a flood of brightness. (Location 432)
- Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. (Location 443)
- “When we get this high up, the clouds turn into boulders—hard rocks—that’s what you’re feeling.” Your lips grazing my ear, your tone soothing, I examined the massive granite-colored mountains across the sky’s horizon. Yes, of course the plane shook. We were moving through rocks, our flight a supernatural perseverance of passage. Because to go back to that man took that kind of magic. The plane should rattle, it should nearly shatter. With the laws of the universe made new, I sat back and watched as we broke through one mountain after another. (Location 452)
- None of us spoke as we checked out, our words suddenly wrong everywhere, even in our mouths. (Location 483)
- 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. (Location 490)
- I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours. (Location 494)
New highlights added November 14, 2021 at 8:54 PM
- 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. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing. (Location 628)
New highlights added December 2, 2021 at 10:13 AM
- Because there are no salaries, health care, or contracts, the body being the only material to work with and work from. Having nothing, it becomes its own contract, a testimony of presence. (Location 1016)
New highlights added December 6, 2021 at 9:16 PM
- In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. (Location 1159)
- Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain. (Location 1178)
- How the sharper edges of his body—shoulders, elbows, chin, and nose—poked through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface. (Location 1318)
- said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth. (Location 1321)
New highlights added December 10, 2021 at 12:54 AM
- He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower away from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth. (Location 1501)
- 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? (Location 1549)
- the gallon of milk on its side, the liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare, a red eye winking. (Location 1597)
- Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation. To stay close to Gramoz was to remain within the circumference of his one act of kindness, was to go back in time, to the lunch hour, that pizza heavy in my palm. (Location 1661)
New highlights added December 12, 2021 at 12:25 PM
- 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, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. (Location 1744)
- is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. (Location 1750)
New highlights added December 15, 2021 at 1:03 PM
- Some kind of quiet sharpened between us. (Location 1887)
- The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones. (Location 1934)
- I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two. (Location 2008)
- On the highway, the October trees blur by, branches raking purple sky. In between them, the lampposts of soundless towns hang in fog. We cross a bridge and a roadside gas station leaves a neon throb in my head. (Location 2015)
- kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. (Location 2067)
- 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. (Location 2103)
- But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? (Location 2144)
- You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.” (Location 2145)
- The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? (Location 2168)
New highlights added December 17, 2021 at 6:43 PM
- A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future. (Location 2273)
- Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more. (Location 2293)
- Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, (Location 2359)
- It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for. (Location 2481)
- And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you. (Location 2572)
- Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns. Unicorns stamping in a graveyard. (Location 2684)
New highlights added December 19, 2021 at 8:03 PM
- Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted. (Location 2822)
title: “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”
author: “Ocean Vuong”
url: ""
date: 2023-12-19
source: kindle
tags: media/books
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Metadata
Highlights
- I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey. (Location 143)
- It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing. (Location 150)
- To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger. (Location 159)
- our breaths floating above us, the makeup drying on your face. Our hands empty except for our hands. (Location 196)
- If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast. (Location 227)
- When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind? (Location 246)
- 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.” (Location 252)
- What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts. (Location 257)
- To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once. (Location 262)
- You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it. Look. (Location 277)
- But it was stillness, I realize now, that I sought, not of her body, which kept ticking as she slept, but of her mind. Only in this twitching quiet did her brain, wild and explosive during waking hours, cool itself into something like calm. (Location 291)
- To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield. (Location 317)
- I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us. (Location 383)
- mauve with early dark: (Location 387)
- Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows. (Location 403)
- My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere. (Location 409)
- I’d drink it down, gulping, making sure you could see, both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy. I’m drinking light, I thought. I’m filling myself with light. The milk would erase all the dark inside me with a flood of brightness. (Location 432)
- Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. (Location 443)
- “When we get this high up, the clouds turn into boulders—hard rocks—that’s what you’re feeling.” Your lips grazing my ear, your tone soothing, I examined the massive granite-colored mountains across the sky’s horizon. Yes, of course the plane shook. We were moving through rocks, our flight a supernatural perseverance of passage. Because to go back to that man took that kind of magic. The plane should rattle, it should nearly shatter. With the laws of the universe made new, I sat back and watched as we broke through one mountain after another. (Location 452)
- None of us spoke as we checked out, our words suddenly wrong everywhere, even in our mouths. (Location 483)
- 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. (Location 490)
- I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours. (Location 494)
- 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. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing. (Location 628)
- Because there are no salaries, health care, or contracts, the body being the only material to work with and work from. Having nothing, it becomes its own contract, a testimony of presence. (Location 1016)
- In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. (Location 1159)
- Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain. (Location 1178)
- How the sharper edges of his body—shoulders, elbows, chin, and nose—poked through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface. (Location 1318)
- said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth. (Location 1321)
- He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower away from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth. (Location 1501)
- 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? (Location 1549)
- the gallon of milk on its side, the liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare, a red eye winking. (Location 1597)
- Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation. To stay close to Gramoz was to remain within the circumference of his one act of kindness, was to go back in time, to the lunch hour, that pizza heavy in my palm. (Location 1661)
- 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, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. (Location 1744)
- is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. (Location 1750)
- Some kind of quiet sharpened between us. (Location 1887)
- The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones. (Location 1934)
- I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two. (Location 2008)
- On the highway, the October trees blur by, branches raking purple sky. In between them, the lampposts of soundless towns hang in fog. We cross a bridge and a roadside gas station leaves a neon throb in my head. (Location 2015)
- kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. (Location 2067)
- 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. (Location 2103)
- But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? (Location 2144)
- You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.” (Location 2145)
- The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? (Location 2168)
- A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future. (Location 2273)
- Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more. (Location 2293)
- Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, (Location 2359)
- It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for. (Location 2481)
- And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you. (Location 2572)
- Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns. Unicorns stamping in a graveyard. (Location 2684)
- Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted. (Location 2822)