Miguel Syjuco Quotes

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

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

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

Love and honesty don't mix.

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

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.

Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

morality... comes at a price.

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

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

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

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

To be angry implies you care

How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions

I transform fiction into memory.

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

Love and honesty don’t mix.

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