Assembling Alice Quotes

“It might be that we have to create new dreams, yes, but these might only be new dreams now given our current reality; these dreams might also be the very dreams of our grandmothers and grandfathers, and their mothers and fathers.”
― Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Assembling Alice

“When your father and Salvacion approach my father and mother for what they call cuentas claras; when our wedding to them means nothing more than splitting nickles and dimes, pesos and centavos, I look at you and think that you are not of this world, that there are things not of this world that make themselves known here, in this world's low and imperious corners. And I am yours now, as much as you are mine.”
― Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Assembling Alice

“When I noticed these negotiations between husbands and wives, I knew I never wanted to be married. Why marry when all the men in my life--my brother not least--want only relations with bad women, and to end the day with their good wives? Even making love seems like a sham phrase. When Felix had told me, at sixteen, that he lived for that shuddering relief, it had only seemed to me that all men want is to relieve themselves inside their women, good or bad, and that it must be quite like taking a piss, and I most definitely did not want to be pissed in.”
― Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Assembling Alice

“For the first time in my life, I had begun to feel that kind of slow desolation that rises, little by little, slowly, slowly every day, that one hardly knows it is there. Until that one day when all those small deaths accrue into a kind of leaden weight one feels in the legs and the arms. One cannot move from all that pain that manifests itself as an all-encompassing lack of feeling. That is how strong the pain really is. It cannot admit its own hurt to itself. For once, I would have gladly died in that bed smelling of shit, my hair shaved, my heart no longer a muscle but a kind of extraneous organ not part of myself but beating in spite of myself. It was then that I knew that spite was not a thing to take against a captor, but that spite was a thing to hold against one's self. For I did not want to be alive. Life, and my daily affirmation of it, was not something I wanted, as time went by.”
― Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Assembling Alice

“In Intramuros, and only in Intramuros, does he ever feel at rest. He thinks to himself here are the ancient stones of Manila; here are the secrets whispered by heroes to their paramours; here, they have plotted revolutions by candlelight, in air punctuated by mosquitoes, and harm, and roses”
― Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Assembling Alice