Gina Apostol > Quotes

“The sea is a memory. It is mesmerising. Its beauty is intolerable. What it buries is vaster than what it reveals. Every so often you get a glimpse of what you forget, or you wade in and something snags you, a broken shell or a sea urchin the fishermen missed...No waves speak with the same voice, though they share the same elements and motion, the regular beating of the surf, their rippling heaves.”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“She calls these reader moments the quibbles—when she gets stuck in the faulty notion that everything in a book must be grasped. Why should readers be spooked about not knowing all the details in a book about the Philippines yet surge forward with resolve in stories about France?”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“Foreign monopoly capitalism and the comprador bourgeoisie hinder the growth of industry: they must be opposed by the people's democratic revolution.”
― Gina Apostol, Gun Dealers' Daughter

“Everybody is messed up and occupied by others! Even if you are not Filipino! We are all creatures of translation, parallel chapters repeating in a universal void!”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“At times, she feels discomfort over matters she knows nothing about, and Magsalin hears rising up in her that quaver that readers have, as if the artist should be holding her hand as she is walked through the story. But she rides the wave, she checks herself. A reader does not need to know everything”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“It is their country, sergeant. You only hold the keys.”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“There will be unapologetic uses of generic types, actors with duplicating roles. Anachronisms, false starts, scarlet clues, a noirish insistence on the pathetic pursuit of human truths will pervade its miserable (quite thin) plot, and while the mystery will seem unsolved, to some it will provide the satisfaction of unrelieved despair.”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“But the fact is, like my mom, most Filipinos prefer to keep history in the dark or, in these days, sold to the highest bidder.
Who can blame them.
It's kind of painful to remember.”
― Gina Apostol, La Tercera

“For her uncles, she realizes, it is as if ever since she left the country for New York City—for nothing! not to send money home but just to “galavant!”—ever since she left she has relinquished her right to her memory of home, and she should not be left to her devices or she will bumble through the nation like a witless tourist who cannot speak its languages, though in fact she code-switches in three of them, puns in five, makes money in two, and dreams in one.”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“That was no insurrection, Colonel. We were fighting a war against your enemy. You said you came to help us. In the name of democracy--to free ourselves from tyrannical Spain. Instead, you invaded. In the treaty of Paris you paid twenty million dollars to buy our islands from the already vanquished Spain. We resisted you. Your army killed six hundred thousand Filipinos from 1899 to 1902, a war worse than Vietnam. That was no insurrection, Colonel. That was our war of independence.”
― Gina Apostol, Gun Dealers' Daughter

“You have not written your talambuhay. You have not done your class analysis. You cannot express your class relation to the masses. You cannot envision society as a creature with genuine warmth or pumping heart. We do not believe you can tell us truthfully who you are. You are a coward. A moral void lies in you, large as a copper coin--but a hole nonetheless. You do not have the imagination to possess affection. You have a cadaverous soul.”
― Gina Apostol, Gun Dealers' Daughter

“Come on, Paco, she says---this can't be the first time you've grasped how shiny objects---
He shifts. He stares at the capiz windows.
She continues---
How our shiny objects are also signs of loss.”
― Gina Apostol, La Tercera

“The Unintended, Professor Estrella Espejo points out, pushes the envelope: within the spiral of war and loops of art is an unknown war wrapped in another, a ghost in its machine.”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“It's horrible how we forget the past, just like that--we forget how war has killed the best of us. People barely remember her name, the names of those who fell to the dictatorship. The best among us have died. And it is the cockroaches who survived. Somehow, it seems to me, we are all guilty of a failure of memory.”
― Gina Apostol, Gun Dealers' Daughter

“The strange scent of burning trailed the riverbanks down Balangiga, toward San Roque, out by Guiuan and Giporlos. The news spread through their noses, this sweet and terrible smell, this news that was not benevolent, the news of burning rice.”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“The hallway of the house in Salogó was no mess of my mom’s paints but a tangle of sequins, gowns with butterfly sleeves, also called terno or mestiza, everything always had multiple names, and pumps with bullet heels. With the intensity of an artist, my mom became Tio Nemorino’s election manager, as if her transference of skill, from painting to politics, possessed value in equal measure. My favorite image of this time is a glossy picture of my mother about to lead the dance in a gown of black tulle, I liked the femme-fatale profile, her look of a vampira in the ballroom—I liked her shocking look amid the pastel dancers. In the picture, she’s in some barrio hall, in her well-sprayed bouffant, her terno in that uncommon black, and high heels, her foot in the air about to take her first step, the entrada, and she is looking at no one in particular, at an absent demonio, who knows if in her mind it was at him, the bastard, my father, though the picture tells me she had no worry but the dance, she glanced in a side-view pose like an actress, Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman, and then we’d ride home in the mud through Salogó’s farmlands until the next election event. How many times have I been at a party with my mother, overwhelmed by our family’s public face—this need for voters to love you. I used to wake up at night after those election dances and crawl over to her bed, put my ear to her chest, and hear her tired breathing, to reassure myself she was still who she was, and not the vampira of TEIPCO.”
― Gina Apostol, La Tercera

“I would like to make a movie in which the spectator understands that she is in a work of someone else's construction, and yet as she watches, she is devising her own translations for the movie in which she in fact exists.”
― Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

“Life was this multiplication of things, actions, and trivial gestures. That had always been the case, and one is meant to accept this, the successive production of wasteful days. To seek this replication, to fertilize and shelter it. One is meant to prolong.”
― Gina Apostol, Gun Dealers' Daughter

“There are consequences to your desires that you will regret, no matter how much you imagine your evils are unintended.”
― Gina Apostol