Miguel Syjuco quotes
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“Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado”, p.437, Pan Macmillan
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“History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.15, Macmillan
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“To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.14, Macmillan
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“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 SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.144, Macmillan
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“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”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.70, Macmillan
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“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 -
“If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado”, p.26, Pan Macmillan
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“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.”
-- Miguel Syjuco -
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“Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.228, Macmillan
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“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.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : "Author Q&A: Miguel Syjuco revisits the Philippines' troubled past in Ilustrado". Interview with Brian Lynch, www.straight.com. October 28, 2010.
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“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.”
-- Miguel Syjuco -
“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 SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado”, p.399, Pan Macmillan
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“Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado”, p.429, Pan Macmillan
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“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 SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.15, Macmillan
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“Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.”
-- Miguel Syjuco -
“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 SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.31, Macmillan
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“Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.33, Macmillan
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“Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.208, Macmillan
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“It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado: A Novel”, p.28, Macmillan
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“Love and honesty don't mix.”
-- Miguel SyjucoSource : Miguel Syjuco (2010). “Ilustrado”, p.22, Pan Macmillan
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“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.”
-- Miguel Syjuco
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