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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ago

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.

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