“It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“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.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp?”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“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.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person?”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from 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.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“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...”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“And yet,from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“All of humanity's crimes,' Salvador said... 'are only degrees of theft.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“There are only three truths. That which can be known. That which can never be known. The third, which concerns the writer alone, truly is neither of these.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“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.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Here, need blurs the line between good and bad, and a constant promise of random violence sticks like humidity down your back.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“A man with battered hands is shown to be a craftsman only when he puts them to work.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“Maybe maturity is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options of life.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“I’m making this confession without hope for absolution.
One morning, I pretended to go crazy. Perhaps in pretending, I proved myself so.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“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.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“You were so beautiful when you were young. So much idealism it was inspiring.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“The little things, you know, eventually become everything.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
“I once thought that The Bridges Ablaze would be that masterpiece. I'm not so sure it matters much anymore. You must learn this while you are still young. Live in the crux of the present. And write to explain the world to yourself and to others. Look forward only to the summer of your first convertible. Look forward only if what's in front of you is a mirror. Because one day you'll be so busy looking backward, and everything will feel like winter. If you still don't get it, pare, let me make it abundantly clear. Just write and write justly. Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole.”
― Miguel Syjuco, quote from Ilustrado
Miguel Syjuco
Born place: Manila, Philippines
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“You don’t understand –” “Like hell I don’t!” Mitch said, slamming his beer glass onto the table. “Who do you think you are? You don’t think I know? Hell, Taylor, I probably know you better than you know yourself. You think you’re the only one with a shitty past? You think you’re the only one who’s always trying to change it? I have news for you. Everyone has crap in their background, everyone has things they wish they could undo. But most people don’t go around doing their best to screw up their present lives because of it.”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from The Rescue
“I froze. It was not guilt that froze me. I had taught myself never to feel guilt. It was not a ghastly sense of loss that froze me. I had taught myself to covet nothing. It was not a loathing of death that froze me. I had taught myself to think of death as a friend. It was not heartbroken rage against injustice that froze me. I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair. It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, quote from Mother Night
“Everyone is happier if they have someone else to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from A Dirty Job
“When did you become so weak?” I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.”
― Paula Hawkins, quote from The Girl on the Train
“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from Life, the Universe and Everything
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When Strangers meet....BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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