Cirilo F. Bautista > Quotes

“... misfortune and creativity go together.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature

“Nevertheless we laughed as best we could
Because we are helpless while we are loved.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, A Native Clearing: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English Since the '50s to the Present : Edith L. Tiempo to Cirilo F. Bautista

“It also seems that the unhappy writers are the enduring writer. Hampered or limited by their suffering, literature becomes their focus and salvation, forcing them to give their best every moment of creation. Writing becomes their medicine, their way of escape, the catalyst for their imagination.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature

“Because life, as Pablo Picasso averred, 'is a very bad novel', it has to be reworked through the writers' suffering into something much more meaningful, much more valuable. A life lived and relived, then, emitting intensity and beauty only achievable by a journey through pain.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature

“Language, because it is imperfect, cannot encompass experience in its raw and primal condition. To verbalize emotion and action is to decrease their impact.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature

“[T]he greater the suffering, the greater the literary quality.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature

“... since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature

“And so to those who ask, "For whom do you write?" I answer, "If you read my column, then I write for you.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature

“We seek in literature what we cannot find in life, and in life what literature promises.”
― Cirilo F. Bautista, The House of True Desire: Essays on Life and Literature