Best 32 quotes of Miguel Syjuco on MyQuotes

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love.

Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

I dont see myself as any different from all the other Filipinos who have gone abroad looking for opportunity, to be a nurse, a labourer, a maid or a prostitute.

I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on Ilustrado.

I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

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.

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.

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

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow--the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

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.

When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They're gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things.

A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.

As we all came to discover the limitations of assimilation, we grew closer as a family

‎"A writer has to talk about the things that go untalked about

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

...guilt is often assumed before innocence can be proven.

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

How did we become so prejudiced by our idiosyncrasies?...We shared the same languages, but spoke of worlds so subtly different that language was not enough. Over time the big things were left unsaid; they gave way to the little things, those once-endearing imperfections that had somewhere become deal breakers.

I learned much from Crispin, though a lot of the things he went on about passed over my head. But he was one of those teachers who, by a kind of osmosis, helped you discover the quantity of areas in your life in which you are still so ignorant as not to have even considered forming a wrong opinion.

I transform fiction into memory.

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

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...

To be angry implies you care

Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child

...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.