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Nick Joaquín QUOTES

Nick Joaquín QUOTES

1 " Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

2 " This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

3 " Today, you can pick your own news. At no time has the world been this compatible with apathy. "

― Nick Joaquín ,

4 " If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself. "

― Nick Joaquín , The Woman Who Had Two Navels

5 " Environment is what you make it and destiny is how you react to your environment: whether you try to overcome it or just resign yourself to it. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

6 " We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

7 " When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil? "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

8 " The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

9 " No individual existence can be traced further than the moment of conception, which determined that what was to be born would be this person and no other. The person may change from baby to child, and from boy to man, but through all these changes he will remain this person and cannot be another, because all possibilities to the contrary that may have existed before the moment of conception ended forever with the moment of conception. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

10 " ...and that there were many things grow-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves... "

― Nick Joaquín , The Woman Who Had Two Navels

11 " ...and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves... "

― Nick Joaquín , The Woman Who Had Two Navels

12 " The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

13 " If your hands were not clean, your good actions had grimmer and more relentless consequences than your sins. "

― Nick Joaquín , The Woman Who Had Two Navels

14 " Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History

15 " BUT, alas, the heart forgets; the heart is distracted; and Maytime passes; summer ends; the storms break over the rot-ripe orchards and the heart grows old; while the hours, the days, the months, and the years pile up and pile up, till the mind becomes too crowded, too confused: dust gathers in it; cobwebs multiply; the walls darken and fall into ruin and decay; the memory perishes... "

― Nick Joaquín , May Day Eve and Other Stories

16 " I believe, do you know, we never stop being what we were, young. We don't shed the young self, we just put on other skins, one cover after another, but somewhere in us is still the self we were before we fell, before we started covering ourselves. And all the rest of our lives, we're trying to go back, we're looking for it, what we lost. "

― Nick Joaquín , Cándido's Apocalypse

17 " The world was always going to be remade by people who were too busy to remake themselves first and who left the world twice as miserable as before. "

― Nick Joaquín , May Day Eve and Other Stories

18 " When he had gone home, he had been frightened, he had refused to face what he saw. But he had not really wanted to come home to a land, only to a pas; and not finding the past there, he had run away, fearing the reality, preferring the dream. "

― Nick Joaquín , The Woman Who Had Two Navels

19 " I love" is a door girls slam in their fathers' faces. "

― Nick Joaquín

20 " If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life... The rift is... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye. "

― Nick Joaquín , Culture and History