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1 " It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness. "
― Miguel Syjuco ,
2 " Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves. "
3 " To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life. "
4 " Love and honesty don’t mix. "
5 " History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth. "
6 " Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world? "
7 " I transform fiction into memory. "
8 " Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world. "
9 " Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get. "
10 " Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness. "
11 " Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be. "
12 " When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They’re gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things. "
13 " The instant before something comes into focus is more exciting than any sharp certainty. Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelessness is the task of music and painting. But a good photograph holds time just as a vase holds water. The water will evaporate and the vase becomes a memorial to it. What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience... "
14 " You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that? "
15 " I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough. "
16 " How did we become so prejudiced by our idiosyncrasies?...We shared the same languages, but spoke of worlds so subtly different that language was not enough. Over time the big things were left unsaid; they gave way to the little things, those once-endearing imperfections that had somewhere become deal breakers. "
17 " How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp? "
18 " Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago. "
19 " We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand. "
20 " How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person? "