Miguel Syjuco > Quotes

“It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“...guilt is often assumed before innocence can be proven.”
― Miguel Syjuco

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

“Love and honesty don’t mix.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.”
― Miguel Syjuco

“Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love.”
― Miguel Syjuco

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

“How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp?”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

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

“I transform fiction into memory.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person?”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“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.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

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

“He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities.”
― Miguel Syjuco

“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?”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it”
― Miguel Syjuco

“If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.”
― Miguel Syjuco

“Love isn't based on gratitude. Respect isn't based on debt.”
― Miguel Syjuco

“Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World.”
― Miguel Syjuco

“To be angry implies you care”
― Miguel Syjuco

“...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.”
― Miguel Syjuco

“The instant before something comes into focus is more exciting than any sharp certainty. Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelessness is the task of music and painting. But a good photograph holds time just as a vase holds water. The water will evaporate and the vase becomes a memorial to it. What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience...”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

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

“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.”
― Miguel Syjuco

“Because falling, if you live in the moment,is really just flying, at least until you read the ground”
― Miguel Syjuco