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styxis 's review for:
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
3,5 ☆
This review is mostly just for me, writing down the most impactful quotes I noticed in the book, so that I can reread them sometime in the future and think back on them. This book provided some really beautiful gems (but also some weird and incomprehensible passages).
The first part of the book was by far my favorite. The sentences moved me and I couldn't help but feel the strong melancholy they emitted. The entire book actually, gave me a sense of sadness. It felt deeply personal, honest, and in some interactions between characters, brutal. I sometimes even wondered if I was actually reading a memoir instead of fiction, and after reading a bit about the authors personal life, he might've actually inserted some of his own experiences into his own characters.
God and the title in itself is just wonderful. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I cannot stop thinking about it.
The second and third part of the book were honestly a bit rough for me to go through. And I don't say that because of the topics discussed, which are undoubtedly rough, but because I wasn't keen on picking up the book again to continue reading it. Something was missing in those pages and I had a bit of a hard time fixating on them.
I still respect the authors work though. He connected these touching topics with beautiful and poetic sentences and created art that is, in itself, something gorgeous.
This review is mostly just for me, writing down the most impactful quotes I noticed in the book, so that I can reread them sometime in the future and think back on them. This book provided some really beautiful gems (but also some weird and incomprehensible passages).
The first part of the book was by far my favorite. The sentences moved me and I couldn't help but feel the strong melancholy they emitted. The entire book actually, gave me a sense of sadness. It felt deeply personal, honest, and in some interactions between characters, brutal. I sometimes even wondered if I was actually reading a memoir instead of fiction, and after reading a bit about the authors personal life, he might've actually inserted some of his own experiences into his own characters.
God and the title in itself is just wonderful. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I cannot stop thinking about it.
The second and third part of the book were honestly a bit rough for me to go through. And I don't say that because of the topics discussed, which are undoubtedly rough, but because I wasn't keen on picking up the book again to continue reading it. Something was missing in those pages and I had a bit of a hard time fixating on them.
I still respect the authors work though. He connected these touching topics with beautiful and poetic sentences and created art that is, in itself, something gorgeous.
Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
The body, it fills up. And your thirst overflows what holds it. And your ruin, you thought it would nourish him. That he would feast on it and grow into a beast you could hide in.
A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.
Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you.
I'm not with you because I'm at war with everything but you.
And like a word, I hold no weight in this world yet still carry my own life.
What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story - when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.
We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.
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.