Miguel Syjuco Quotes

A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.

morality... comes at a price.

Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.

Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child

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 explosions

To be angry implies you care

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

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...

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

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.

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

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

I transform fiction into memory.

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it

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

...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.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

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.

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.

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

Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.

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.

Love and honesty don’t mix.