Ilustrado Quotes

“It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Love and honesty don’t mix.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp?”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person?”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“I transform fiction into memory.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“All of humanity's crimes,' Salvador said... 'are only degrees of theft.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“Maybe maturity is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options of life.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“A man with battered hands is shown to be a craftsman only when he puts them to work.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Here, need blurs the line between good and bad, and a constant promise of random violence sticks like humidity down your back.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“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, Ilustrado

“How did we become so prejudiced by our idiosyncrasies?...We shared the same languages, but spoke of worlds so subtly different that language was not enough. Over time the big things were left unsaid; they gave way to the little things, those once-endearing imperfections that had somewhere become deal breakers.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“The little things, you know, eventually become everything.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“You were so beautiful when you were young. So much idealism it was inspiring.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado

“Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it.”
― Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado