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

“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.”

“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?”

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

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

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

“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.”