Ocean Vuong Quotes

We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another. ~ Ocean Vuong

What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence - it's what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.
Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft,
whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise
over. ~ Ocean Vuong

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined. ~ Ocean Vuong

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you. ~ Ocean Vuong

I didn't know that would be the last time I'd see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner's neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? ~ Ocean Vuong

use it to prove how the stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word ~ Ocean Vuong

Stupid boy,
You can get lost in every book
but you can never forget yourself
the way god forgets
his hands. ~ Ocean Vuong

It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for. ~ Ocean Vuong

& so what–if my feathers
are burning. I
never asked for flight. ~ Ocean Vuong

Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. 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. ~ Ocean Vuong

But some nothing's changed everything after them. ~ Ocean Vuong

...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... one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. 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. ~ Ocean Vuong

The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. ~ Ocean Vuong

I don't know if I believe this but that's what it felt like: As if we were to people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I. ~ Ocean Vuong

To love another man is to leave no one behind to forgive me. ~ Ocean Vuong

Note to self: If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn't be stuck down here. ~ Ocean Vuong

What is a country, but a life sentence? ~ Ocean Vuong

Eurydice"

It's more like the sound
a doe makes
when the arrowhead
replaces the day
with an answer to the rib's
hollowed hum. We saw it coming
but kept walking through the hole
in the garden. Because the leaves
were bright green & the fire
only a pink brushstroke
in the distance. It's not
about the light - but how dark
it makes you depending
on where you stand.
Depending on where you stand
his name can appear like moonlight
shredded in a dead dog's fur.
His name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. We kept saying Yes -
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real
& the body imaginary.
But here we are - standing
in the cold field, him calling
for the girl. The girl
beside him. Frosted grass
snapping beneath her hooves. ~ Ocean Vuong

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. ~ Ocean Vuong

When we left it, the city was still smoldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered by the bombed bakery. Broken baguettes. Crushed croissants. Gutted cars. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us. ~ Ocean Vuong

All this time I told myself we were born from war-- but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but for that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it. ~ Ocean Vuong

I looked between my legs and saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what it always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again...

To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That's what I was. ~ Ocean Vuong

Because he tasted like the river and maybe you were one wing away from sinking. ~ Ocean Vuong

And this is how we danced: with our mothers'
white dresses spilling from our feet, late August

turning our hands dark red. And this is how we loved:
a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in the attic, your fingers

sweeping though my hair - my hair a wildfire.
We covered our ears and your father's tantrum turned

into heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above the fireplace.

Always another hour to kill - only to beg some god
to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car,

the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive,
put down the phone. Because the year is a distance

we've traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how
we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

This is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning
into a tongue. ~ Ocean Vuong

I didn't know the cost
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back. ~ Ocean Vuong

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. ~ Ocean Vuong

Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood. ~ Ocean Vuong

I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room's threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed. ~ Ocean Vuong

We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it's also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves. ~ Ocean Vuong

No, madam,' I said to the woman in my ESL English. "That's my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I'm doing fine."...
You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers adn sons, is considered taboo- so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say,'This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole! ~ Ocean Vuong

I met a man tonight.... maybe I shouldn't have, but he had the hands of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to. ~ Ocean Vuong

We made it, baby.
We're riding in the back of the black
limousine. They have lined
the road to shout our names.
They have faith in your golden hair
& pressed grey suit.
They have a good citizen
in me. I love my country.
I pretend nothing is wrong.
I pretend not to see the man
& his blond daughter diving
for cover, that you're not saying
my name & it's not coming out
like a slaughterhouse.
I'm not Jackie O yet
& there isn't a hole in your head, a brief
rainbow through a mist
of rust. I love my country
but who am I kidding? I'm holding
your still-hot thoughts in,
darling, my sweet, sweet
Jack. I'm reaching across the trunk
for a shard of your memory,
the one where we kiss & the nation
glitters. Your slumped back.
Your hand letting go. You're all over
the seat now, deepening
my fuchsia dress. But I'm a good
citizen, surrounded by Jesus
& ambulances. I love
this country. The twisted faces.
My country. The blue sky. Black
limousine. My one white glove
glistening pink - with all
our American dreams. ~ Ocean Vuong

I'll tell you how we're wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chain saw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. & so I learned - that a man in climax was the closest thing
to surrender. ~ Ocean Vuong

We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day-- neither good or bad, but something we passed through. ~ Ocean Vuong

He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That's what I wanted - not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger. Then I wanted more, the scent, the atmosphere of him, the taste of French fries and peanut butter under the salve of his tongue, the salt around his neck from two hour drives to nowhere and a Burger King at the edge of the county, a day of tense talk with his old man, the rust from the electric razor he shared with that old man, how I would always find it on the sink in its sad plastic case, the tobacco, weed and cocaine smoke on his fingers mixed with motor oil, all of it accumulating into the afterscent of wood smoke caught and soaked in his hair, as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to. ~ Ocean Vuong

Writing, if nothing else, is a bridge between two people, a bridge made of language. And language belongs to all of us. If I enjoy a poem, that just means I am recognizing within it something of myself, something I must already possess. Therefore, to love a poem is to love a part of myself revealed to me by another person… ~ Ocean Vuong

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.

Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you'd kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling. ~ Ocean Vuong

I don't know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. ~ Ocean Vuong

A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved. ~ Ocean Vuong

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand
to your chest."

"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous ~ Ocean Vuong

He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing
another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables

inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press
into her  -  as the field shreds itself

with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home
out of  hip bones. O mother,

O minutehand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst

holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body

like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. & I am your son. ~ Ocean Vuong

[…] remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

from "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong," The New Yorker: Poems. May 4, 2015 Issue. ~ Ocean Vuong

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. ~ Ocean Vuong

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are. ~ Ocean Vuong

They will tell you that to be political is to be merely angry, and therefore artless, depthless, "raw," and empty. They will speak of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. They will tell you that great writing "breaks free" from the political, thereby "transcending" the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They'll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let's see how it's made, they'll say- as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form. ~ Ocean Vuong

I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt ~ Ocean Vuong

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 begin with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere. Even when I know something to be true I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. ~ Ocean Vuong

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, 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. ~ Ocean Vuong

To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time. ~ Ocean Vuong

Because something in him know she'd be there. That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else. ~ Ocean Vuong

To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once. ~ Ocean Vuong

Brooklyn's too cold tonight
& all my friends are three years away.
My mother said I could be anything
I wanted - but I chose to live.
On the stoop of an old brownstone,
a cigarette flares, then fades.
I walk towards it: a razor
sharpened with silence.
A jawline etched in smoke.
The mouth where I'll be made
new again. Stranger, palpable
echo, here is my hand, filled
with blood thin as a widow's
tears. I am ready. I am ready
to be every animal
you leave behind. ~ Ocean Vuong

To ask 'What's good?' was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another. ~ Ocean Vuong

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft -- no matter how soft her skin is. ~ Ocean Vuong

He dies at the party where everyone laughs & all you want is to go into the kitchen & make seven omelets before burning down the house. ~ Ocean Vuong

A pillaged village is a fine example of a perfect rhyme. He said that.

He was white. Or maybe, I was just beside myself, next to him.

Either way, I forgot his name by heart. ~ Ocean Vuong

Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral. As I listened, there would be moments when the story would change-- not much, just a minuscule detail, the time of day, the color of someone's shirt, two air raids instead of three, an AK-47 instead of a 9mm, the daughter laughing, not crying. Shifts in narrative would occur-- the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone. ~ Ocean Vuong

Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man
staggers forth, his cane tapping lightly
own the aisle. He leans against the door,

raises a violin to chin, and says I'm sorry
to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen.
And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like music

should be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover,
inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo
seeps through our skin like warm water, we

who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light
but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching.
Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roses

on the instrument. His head swooning to each chord
exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me
has put down her book, closed her eyes, the baby

has stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know
this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws
will always open to swallow a smile already lost.

How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.
how will hear these notes when the train slides
into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song

lingers with breaths rising from empty seats?
I know I am too human to praise what is fading.
But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills

completely with warm water, and we are all
swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart
flowing from his hands ~ Ocean Vuong

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. ~ Ocean Vuong

Grandma said In the war they would grab a baby, a soldier at each ankle, and pull...
Just like that.

It's finally spring! Daffodils everywhere.
Just like that. ~ Ocean Vuong

Confetti
green, how I want you green.
Green despite the red despite
the rest. ~ Ocean Vuong

I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning ~ Ocean Vuong

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. ~ Ocean Vuong

Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through. ~ Ocean Vuong

If Mario fell off, he would have to start the level over, from the beginning. This was also called dying. ~ Ocean Vuong

Have you ever made a scene,' you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, 'and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?'

How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging? ~ Ocean Vuong

Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. in which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be the third language that animates where the tongue falters. ~ Ocean Vuong

A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones - with or without citizenship - aching, toxic, and underpaid.

I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be. ~ Ocean Vuong

Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won't remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls. ~ Ocean Vuong

Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow. ~ Ocean Vuong

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. ~ Ocean Vuong

When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart... ~ Ocean Vuong

What are we if not what the light says we are? ~ Ocean Vuong

The say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It's the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country. ~ Ocean Vuong

He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him. ~ Ocean Vuong

It's like when all you've been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there'll be another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: you don't have to be like the buffaloes.
You can stop. ~ Ocean Vuong

It 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 silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it? ~ Ocean Vuong

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 wrong, but simply more.

As a rule, be more. ~ Ocean Vuong

He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers. ~ Ocean Vuong

That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity. ~ Ocean Vuong

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. ~ Ocean Vuong

I have two houses in California, and they're both within a couple of minutes from the beach. So, I definitely feel at home in California and by the ocean. ~ Marisa Miller

The sun has but half a meaning without the shadow it casts into the ocean of the world. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Immigration, exile, being uprooted and made a pariah may be the most effective way yet devised to impress on an individual the arbitrary nature of his or her own existence. Who needed a shrink of a guru when everyone we met asked us who we were the moment we opned our mouths and they heard the accent?

The truth is, we had no simple answers. Being rattled around in freight trains, open trucks, and ratty ocean-liners, we ended up being a puzzle even to ourselves. At first, that was hard to take; then we got used to the idea. We began to savor it, to enjoy it. Being nobody struck me personally as being far more interesting than being somebody. The streets were full of these "somebodys" putting on confident airs. Half the time I envied them; half the time I looked down on them with pity. I knew something they didn't, something hard to come by unless history gives you a good kick in the ass: how superfluous and insignificant in any grand scheme mere individuals are. And how pitiless are those who have no understanding that this could be their fate too. ~ Charles Simic

You said I was the girl who couldn't decide
between the ocean and the shore.
Said the only way to make me fall in love
with the present was to turn it into my past. ~ Lang Leav

We'll drive backwards
in what will become your new car
to the beach where we first slept side by side.
The green waves will go back into the ocean,
yellow and blue.
You'll pull up my underwear.
I'll button your shirt.
We'll dress and dress and dress.
Then we'll step into our footprints
and erase our trail. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto And J Safran Foer

I look around at the beach where I grew up. This is where everything changed for me. I was just a girl who happened to witness the arrival of a strange race of people from under the sea. One of them was the most beautiful person I ever met. He walked out of the ocean and changed my life forever. - Lyric ~ Michael Buckley

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least. ~ Freeman Dyson

I love a boy with sun-kissed hair,
With ocean storms in his bright blue eyes,
I love a boy who drinks my tears when I cry. ~ Petra March

It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water. ~ Margaret Atwood

Neither does man have gills for living in a water environment; yet it is not sinful to explore the depths of the oceans in search of food or other blessings. ~ Walter Lang

In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night ... starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music. ~ Jim Morrison

I want to be a ripple in the infinite ocean of love. ~ Debasish Mridha

I'm afraid too many of us Christians don't know what we really believe. Like a cork in the ocean, driven and tossed by the waves, we bounce from opinion to opinion ... We've become activity junkies, seldom stopping long enough to decide what really matters to us, too busy to determine what's really worth living for, let alone worth dying for. ~ Dennis Rainey

I believe eros dwells in our innermost being as the spirit of creative expression. To me, eros is a great path that we must walk, a song we listen to, a game that we hunt and enjoy, a lesson to learn, a garden where flowers bloom, a prodigious puzzle to solve, a book to read, a chapter to write, and an ocean to swim in. That's what eros is to me. ~ Salil Jha

With Kit, Age Seven, at the Beach
We would climb the highest dune,
from there to gaze and come down:
the ocean was performing;
we contributed our climb.
Waves leapfrogged and came
straight out of the storm.
What should our gaze mean?
Kit waited for me to decide.
Standing on such a hill,
what would you tell your child?
That was an absolute vista.
Those waves raced far, and cold.
"How far could you swim, Daddy, in such a storm?"
"As far as was needed," I said,
and as I talked, I swam. ~ William Stafford

All great achievements arose from dissatisfaction. It is the desire to do better, to dig deeper that propels a civilization to greatness. All of us have heard the story of Icarus, the young boy who took the wings his father built for him. Wings that were meant to carry him over the ocean to freedom and used them instead for a joyride. For a brief moment Icarus felt what it was like to live like a god, to touch the sun, to soar above the common man. And for doing so he payed the ultimate price. Like Icarus we too have been given gifts: knowledge, education, experience. And with these gifts comes the responsibility of choice. We alone decide how our talents are bestowed upon the world. This is our destiny and we hold it in the palm of our hands. ~ Todd Bowden Apt Pupil

The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination. ~ Jon Krakauer

The Great Sadness
You can't look at yourself
in the ocean.
Your looks fall apart
like tendrils of light.
Night on earth. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

It was a funny thing, he thought, that when you live all your life in a place, you almost never do the things that tourists go there to do - like walk on the beach or go swimming in the ocean. He couldn't remember the last time he went swimming. He wasn't even sure he still owned a bathing suit. It was like something he had heard about New York - that half the people who live in the city never go to the top of the Empire State Building or visit the Statue of Liberty. ~ Peter Benchley