Kalay Brillo

“If I could make the ripples dance to create futures for my sister, I would. As beautiful as the tiny globes of spherical seawater she used to toy with when we were kids--tiny worlds in their own right, of different colors and sizes, floating in midair. I would have arranged everything so she would get a kind and gentle ending. None of them would end with her lying on the ground, helpless and wake. In fact, if I could, I would remove all endings for her. I would give her a way out, a loophole in this infallible mechanism of time.”
― Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, Laut Stories

“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

“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

“What, after all, is literature but pain remembered. In remembering, we adorn it with our imagination, our craftsmanship, ennobling it perhaps, imbuing it with permanence; it then exists beyond our puny lives, a testament to your humanity for all the world to witness. And having witnessed it, it is our hope that what we have written will evoke compassion, for in the end, this is what draws us together.”
― F. Sionil José, Writing The Nation: Essays on Philippine Literature, Politics, and Culture