1
It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.Miguel Syjuco
2
Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.Miguel Syjuco
3
To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.Miguel Syjuco
4
Love and honesty don’t mix.Miguel Syjuco
5
History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.Miguel Syjuco
6
Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?Miguel Syjuco
7
I transform fiction into memory.Miguel Syjuco
8
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
9
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 explosionsMiguel Syjuco
10
...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
11
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
12
Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.Miguel Syjuco
13
To be angry implies you careMiguel Syjuco
14
Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.Miguel Syjuco
15
Morality... comes at a price.Miguel Syjuco
16
Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.Miguel Syjuco
17
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
18
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
19
Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a childMiguel Syjuco
20
I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the "I". One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change.Miguel Syjuco
21
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
22
A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.Miguel Syjuco
23
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 agoMiguel Syjuco
24
Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from itMiguel Syjuco
25
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
26
I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an e Bay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.Miguel Syjuco
27
What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don't have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.Miguel Syjuco