Smaller And Smaller Circles Quotes

“That's the nature of any kind of rot. If you don't stop it, it keeps going. It will keep going until it destroys the very organism that feeds it.”
― F. H. Batacan

“Her friends used to tell her it wasn't rape if the man was your husband. She didn't say anything, but inside she seethed; she wanted to take a knife to their faces.”
― F. H. Batacan

“Sometimes he talks to her like she is a man. It does not matter. He does not touch her like she is one.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“The compassion you seek is neither mine to give nor yours to ask for.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“In his line of work, nobody ever calls in the dead of night. Still he forgives her for her
sudden departures.

His large, powerful body is always invincibly warm in this freezing room; he likes to turn up the air conditioning and have her burrow into his warmth. For a few moments she considers
staying here, her cheek against his chest, letting his heartbeat lull her back into warm, safe sleep. Then, very reluctantly, she sits
up.

She watches the outline of his body under the covers, and out of habit she reaches out and runs the soft, fleshy pad of her right thumb across the long, brown lashes of his left eye. The eye shuts tighter as the other one opens. Green flecked with gold, catching what little light there is in the room.

“Give me one good reason.”

She cannot think of anything to say.

“Thought not.”

The huge hands with their thick fingers come up behind her head and pull it against his chest. She breathes him in, the smell of soap and warm skin and cigarette smoke. She loves the smell of him, even if she is allergic to secondhand smoke. He cannot, will not stop smoking, and she has to take antihistamines before she sees him. Small sacrifices, like not being able to go out with him in broad daylight, the slight twinge of envy she feels seeing lovers walk through malls and parks with their arms locked around each other. His daylight hours do not belong to her, and neither do these nights; she steals them like a common thief from a wife and children whose faces and names she does not want to know.

Someday soon these sacrifices will not seem so small, and these nights will not be enough. She cannot bear the thought of that day coming, and yet somehow she cannot wait for it to come.”
― F. H. Batacan

“Suspected of ties with the Communist New People’s Army, he disappeared after a lightning rally of farmers and students in Manila in the early 1970s and had not been heard from since. His family believed he had been rounded up by the Metrocom, along with a few other activists and students who had taken part in the rally. He was one of the thousands — fifteen hundred by one count, more than three thousand by another — who fell victim to salvaging. It was a term perverted by the regime’s goons to refer to the extrajudicial killings that had become a dirty open secret of the dictatorship.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“Mainly he just wanted to forget. High school was one very long, very bad dream.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“The Church in this great Catholic country of ours is the last great, unexamined mystery. And I think you know what happens when you don’t let the sunlight into dark places, Father.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“I didn’t like it. I didn’t want any of it. I. Didn’t. Want. It.

How important it was to him to have said this, the one thing he could not say all those terrible, silent years. To have said it so clearly and unequivocally, with the last breath and strength of his life.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles

“Funnily enough, I worry for exactly the opposite reasons. I worry that all this secrecy, all this unwillingness to change, to evolve — to listen to reason — is eroding all that we stand for. Endangering everything that we have vowed to protect and defend.”
― F.H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles