Ninotchka Rosca QUOTES

1 " He saw clearly, immediately, that the man didn't care about the gift's value, didn't care about the gift even, but cared profoundly for the act of receiving as though the gift were a tribute, a confirmation of his self, his being, his reality. He found no pleasure in what he was taking but in the act of taking itself. "

― Ninotchka Rosca , State of War

3 " His knees had turned to water and he had had to sit down on the soft edge, his hands automatically taking her hot, dry hands while his mind, for some strange reason, instantly dredged up from his storehouse of memories his grandfather's tale of Magellan crossing a nameless sea in a still young world. He had seen, as he had looked into her eyes, the sea; depths beyond depths, and the tiny ships and white sails of grace moving along the rim of time. Almost without knowing it, without being aware that he was doing so, he kissed her fingertips one by one, as he told himself that this was what it meant, that to love was to regain the capacity to remember a world without names, to recall by virtue the whorl above the beloved's knucklebones and the blue of the veins beneath the skin the unbearable fragility of mornings in this country, to find October odors trapped in the skinfolds between her toes along with the scent of talcum powder and soap and human sweat. He moved then, without willing it, helplessly, and sank himself into the swamp of her delirium, as her fever broke and her bones melted in a cold sweat that drenched him and the bedsheets, soaking his chest, his legs, his armpits so that he thought he was making love to the monsoon and was himself dissolving into a needle spray of rain and the pungence of washed leaves and cleaned tree bark in a festival to end the dry season. "

― Ninotchka Rosca , State of War

5 " It was a kind of sin, certainly, to forget—but it was not easy to remember, especially when names changed, languages changed. A century-old name held that century; when replaced, a hundred years were wiped out at one stroke. Amnesia set it; reality itself, being metamorphic, was affected. "

― Ninotchka Rosca , State of War

7 " He recalled the rifles without sights, the cross-purposes of wars, and the dark Malays who knew only the most simple, the most fundamental language of all- life, love and liberty -and who now would find themselves within the coils of power and politics. "

― Ninotchka Rosca