“No individual existence can be traced further than the moment of conception, which determined that what was to be born would be this person and no other. The person may change from baby to child, and from boy to man, but through all these changes he will remain this person and cannot be another, because all possibilities to the contrary that may have existed before the moment of conception ended forever with the moment of conception.”

“Shouldn't we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?”

“Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.”

“The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.”

“It's risky to try to determine the moments when a person's life is changed forever. I don't even know if such moments exist.”

“We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.”

“Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.”