Miguel Syjuco

“How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person?”

“Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.”

“Maybe maturity is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options of life.”

“Fiction, however, sometimes ensures disappointment with reality”

“Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.”

“Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.”

“Children sometimes know best and we chide them for being precocious. Then we grow aged and become again like children, and they call us wise.”

“Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it”

“How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions”

“Because falling, if you live in the moment,is really just flying, at least until you read the ground”

“...just because an ideology dies doesn't mean the value of its ideas is nullified”

“...guilt is often assumed before innocence can be proven.”

“...when you hate someone so much, a part of you wants desperately to forgive them. But you can't decide if it's because you really want, or if you just want to stop hating. I still don't know if forgiveness is generous or selfish. Maybe both.”

“The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow--the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago”

“Vilification, by its definition, creates an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale”

“A father must take credit for his child, but never a child for his father.”

“Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child”

“morality... comes at a price.”

“A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.”

“We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity--governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity wit which we rendered them.”

“To be angry implies you care”

“As we all came to discover the limitations of assimilation, we grew closer as a family”

“I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the "I". One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change.”

“He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities.”

“If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.”

“A man with battered hands is shown to be a craftsman only when he puts them to work.”

“Here, need blurs the line between good and bad, and a constant promise of random violence sticks like humidity down your back.”

“All of humanity's crimes,' Salvador said... 'are only degrees of theft.”

“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.”

“History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.”

“How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp?”

“Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying.”

“‎"A writer has to talk about the things that go untalked about”

“Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World.”

“Love isn't based on gratitude. Respect isn't based on debt.”

“Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love.”

“Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.”

“I transform fiction into memory.”

“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.”

“Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.”

“Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.”

“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.”

“It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.”

“To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”

“Love and honesty don’t mix.”

“And yet,from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live.”