Nick Joaquin Quotes

#1. This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

Nick Joaquin

#2. The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

Nick Joaquin

#3. And that there were many things grow-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves ...

Nick Joaquin

#4. Love should have no alternatives; love should be the sole reason for loving; love should spring of itself.

Nick Joaquin

#5. Intramuros! The old Manila. The original Manila. The Noble and Ever Loyal City ...

Nick Joaquin

#6. I love is a door girls slam in their fathers' faces.

Nick Joaquin

#7. We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance ... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.

Nick Joaquin

#8. When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?

Nick Joaquin

#9. Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

Nick Joaquin

#10. Shouldn't we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?

Nick Joaquin

#11. If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life ... The rift is ... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.

Nick Joaquin

#12. Environment is what you make it and destiny is how you react to your environment: whether you try to overcome it or just resign yourself to it.

Nick Joaquin

#13. People who confuse social behavior with manners naturally think of it as something that can be donned and doffed, a fashion that can be copied. But social behavior is nerve and bone, not clothes, and is never just a copy, however derivative it may look.

Nick Joaquin

#14. When he had gone home, he had been frightened, he had refused to face what he saw. But he had not really wanted to come home to a land, only to a pas; and not finding the past there, he had run away, fearing the reality, preferring the dream.

Nick Joaquin

#15. People are all the fun in life - Candido's Apocalypse

Nick Joaquin

#16. If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.

Nick Joaquin

#17. The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.

Nick Joaquin

#18. The world was always going to be remade by people who were too busy to remake themselves first and who left the world twice as miserable as before.

Nick Joaquin

#19. If your hands were not clean, your good actions had grimmer and more relentless consequences than your sins.

Nick Joaquin

#20. I fell in love when I was twenty-six. Love in my interpretation comes once in a lifetime.

Nick Joaquin

#21. Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

Nick Joaquin