Top 76 Miguel Syjuco Quotes
#1. Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get.
Miguel Syjuco
#2. Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
Miguel Syjuco
#3. Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it
Miguel Syjuco
#4. Here, need blurs the line between good and bad, and a constant promise of random violence sticks like humidity down your back.
Miguel Syjuco
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Children sometimes know best and we chide them for being precocious. Then we grow aged and become again like children, and they call us wise.
Miguel Syjuco
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The Philippines, it has a politics of patronage. Family and favors, in addition to the old cliche of guns, goons and gold, really do still hold a lot of sway.
Miguel Syjuco
#12. Guilt is often assumed before innocence can be proven.
Miguel Syjuco
#13. Maybe maturity is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options of life.
Miguel Syjuco
#14. There is that potential of the expats coming back to the Philippines. But sadly they are no opportunities, no incentive for them to come back home. Successive governments have, in fact, been training them to export them rather than working on the economy to welcome them home.
Miguel Syjuco
#15. 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
Miguel Syjuco
#16. Because falling, if you live in the moment,is really just flying, at least until you read the ground
Miguel Syjuco
#17. I grew up with a very privileged background. My father served as one of the cabinet ministers in Arroyo's government, and he's been a congressman for many years, and he's running again.
Miguel Syjuco
#18. My absence was gradual, until one day it was complete.
Miguel Syjuco
#19. As we all came to discover the limitations of assimilation, we grew closer as a family
Miguel Syjuco
#21. Cliches remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that other have trod this ground long ago.
Miguel Syjuco
#22. Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.
Miguel Syjuco
#23. Just because an ideology dies doesn't mean the value of its ideas is nullified
Miguel Syjuco
#24. A father must take credit for his child, but never a child for his father.
Miguel Syjuco
#25. 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 Syjuco
#26. 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
#27. We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity
governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity wit which we rendered them.
Miguel Syjuco
#28. Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying.
Miguel Syjuco
#29. 'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness ... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too.
Miguel Syjuco
#30. When you're unhappy with your life, you become more selfish with it.
Miguel Syjuco
#31. If I were to go back to the Philippines, I would probably end up teaching creative writing at a university. I wouldn't be able to write, for I would become too jaded to be able to view the existing situation objectively.
Miguel Syjuco
#32. Love isn't based on gratitude. Respect isn't based on debt.
Miguel Syjuco
#33. Vilification, by its definition, creates an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale
Miguel Syjuco
#34. I surprise myself that I'm not dead in the gutter somewhere, surprised that I haven't given up.
Miguel Syjuco
#35. Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child
Miguel Syjuco
#36. Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we'll be.
Miguel Syjuco
#37. 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
#38. I don't 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
#39. Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.
Miguel Syjuco
#40. Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?
Miguel Syjuco
#41. With 'Ilustrado,' I set out to change the way we read literature, and I think I failed spectacularly. In fact, I know I failed. In reaching further than I could, I may not have produced a life- or literature-changing book, but I did produce one I am proud of.
Miguel Syjuco
#42. A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.
Miguel Syjuco
#43. Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World.
Miguel Syjuco
#44. 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
#45. I've learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn't be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus.
Miguel Syjuco
#46. A writer has to talk about the things that go untalked about
Miguel Syjuco
#48. A man with battered hands is shown to be a craftsman only when he puts them to work.
Miguel Syjuco
#49. I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn't have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue.
Miguel Syjuco
#50. 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.
Miguel Syjuco
#51. Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.
Miguel Syjuco
#52. 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 Syjuco
#53. The Miguel Syjuco character is not me. I wanted him to represent my own fears and frustrations and guilt, my own worst tendencies and my optimistic expectations. He's a cautionary tale for me. But he's also an examination of the darkest things that haunt me as a person.
Miguel Syjuco
#54. How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp?
Miguel Syjuco
#55. Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.
Miguel Syjuco
#56. History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.
Miguel Syjuco
#57. 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.
Miguel Syjuco
#58. He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities.
Miguel Syjuco
#59. How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person?
Miguel Syjuco
#60. The immigrant experience in 'Ilustrado' was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective.
Miguel Syjuco
#61. I don't believe in nationalism. I think it's a bunch of slogans. It's a bunch of poor attempts at creating pride. My problem with nationalism is that it becomes exclusionary. We start to exclude people.
Miguel Syjuco
#63. 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
#64. Touching on universality is an important part of effective storytelling, but the problem with cliches is that they are tired and dull. And that's where writers must try to be artful.
Miguel Syjuco
#65. To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.
Miguel Syjuco
#66. I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.
Miguel Syjuco
#67. All of humanity's crimes,' Salvador said ... 'are only degrees of theft.
Miguel Syjuco
#68. When you live in the Philippines or a country like that, you develop something of a very thick skin because you're confronted every day with all of the problems all around you.
Miguel Syjuco
#69. I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas ... I write because I'm engaged in this big conversation.
Miguel Syjuco
#70. You were so beautiful when you were young. So much idealism it was inspiring.
Miguel Syjuco
#71. The little things, you know, eventually become everything.
Miguel Syjuco
#72. I love my homeland, but it's an absurd country. Politics in the Philippines is like spectator sports!
Miguel Syjuco
#73. Fiction, however, sometimes ensures disappointment with reality
Miguel Syjuco
#74. It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.
Miguel Syjuco
#75. Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love.
Miguel Syjuco
#76. 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
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