I dont 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.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.