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

“...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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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?”