Rusty Reading

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long. I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bag rans out. They are hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. They are the cornfields in rebel country and the tent cities outside blackened villages and the backrooms where mothers whispered about the children that desperation had forced them to abort.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Nanlaban, under Rodrigo Duterte, did not mean only that a man had fought back. It meant he had fought and died. Nanlaban is judgment and justification, verb and noun, a shorthand for the dead bastards who deserved what they got.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“Fuck the bleeding hearts. To hell with bureaucracy. There would be no forgiveness, there would be no second chances, the line would be drawn, and on one side he would stand with a loaded gun.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country

“President Duterte said kill the addicts, and the addicts died. He said kill the mayors, and the mayors died. He said kill the lawyers, and the lawyers died.”
― Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country