“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.”

“If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life... The rift is... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.”

“This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.”

“When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?”

“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 point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.”

“When he had gone home, he had been frightened, he had refused to face what he saw. But he had not really wanted to come home to a land, only to a pas; and not finding the past there, he had run away, fearing the reality, preferring the dream.”