Quotes by Singaporean Authors

In writing I try to pare down the descriptive bits. If I feel that I could say something in as few words as possible, then I would rather do it than to go on padding. One should describe sufficiently to give the reader a sense of what one feels, but not at the same time overwhelm the reader in any way. For example, I feel that if you use lots of adjectives they have a mutually cancelling effect. If you can describe a scene well enough, without having to use far too many words, I would rather do so.
Arthur Yap
There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.
Adrian Tan
writing home"here in the wilderness of australiawriting home becomes easyin spite of the spreading wild firesthere is less heat, more certainty.writing home, writing thisi think of those without real homes–our city, people say, provides houseswhich do not, often, bring one home.
Kirpal Singh
But the insane need to do it was stronger than the sense of whether it was a wrong or right thing to do.
Jess C. Scott
If money’s the god people worship, I’d rather go worship the devil instead.
Jess C. Scott
Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.
Agnes Chew
Hate was the other side of love, wasn’t it? That’s what passion was like with her—to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. We traveled to heaven and hell together. Earth wasn’t in the picture, and that was a problem.
Jess C. Scott
We weren’t happy together but we lived in a state of easy, mild contentment. We shared everything except the stupid fucking secret hanging round your neck. I imagined tiny photographs: portraits in sepia of your parents, their faces partially obscured by goitres. Meanwhile, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, maybe not even in a decade from now but one day: the planet would fall apart.
Jon Gresham
I write about myself so you can fathom a personification of sadness. About God because when you asked me if I were religious I told you faith is what I try my darndest to keep dearest. About fear so that I gradually gain perspectives between the night sky and stars. About love because that concept seems out of reach I am not built with the capacity for much. About a leaf falling because tears are pretty much similar. About romance because hope sometimes settles in the dark. About nature because forces are both abstract and concrete it blows the temple in my heart. About loneliness so I can hear you say I am not the only one feeling that way. I write about feelings so I can cope with the fear that they might one day not be able to come again. About hell because there are odds and possibilities. About us because there are odds and possibilities, albeit lesser. About heaven because days are too warm here I hope it rains tonight. I write about death so when it comes it tastes like rain, at night, in heaven. I write about you so perhaps you won't forget to remember me.
Noor Iskandar
[Ever been kissed?]I want to know if you've
Jess C. Scott
Other girls play with soft toys,” I said, “and you play with knives…
Jess C. Scott
It was a soulless gaze, burning with a wild hatred that shouldn’t be there in anyone who could call themselves a parent.
Jess C. Scott
Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle.All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop.
Cyril Wong
The laws governed people’s happiness. To be lawless was to be happy.
Jess C. Scott
Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.
Jon Gresham
Be Good-Do Good-Be One
Kirpal Singh
When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.
Jess C. Scott
The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out.The drought had persisted for over a month.
S. Rajaratnam
The sea was no stranger to the rock on the beach. The sea came often to the rock, rushing up wetly against its warm grey, and always as it swept away it took an infinitesimal part of the rock with it. The rock had known the waves for a long time, and learned it was in its nature to erode.
Chew Chia Shao Wei
We angels are misconceived in the human world. People perceive us as kindly and bountiful; when, in truth, we are about as fluffy, as gentle, as yielding, as rattlesnakes.
Rebecca Lim
A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement
Jess C. Scott
Writing is the light of imagination playing over shadow of thoughts.
Khaled Talib
I would enter the desert alone, to leave in the sand endless footprints only to be obliterated by the wind, to walk the same path each day expecting the same path tomorrow, and perhaps to cease wondering at the bloom and wither of lilies only to linger for death. But no, even in the desert, I would seek a new sanctuary, to contemplate a grain of sand in a sea of dryness...
Leonard Seet
with you, the sense i have lost my place in a bookor simply lost — misplaced the memorywhich isn't in the last place where I looked.a thought that the clouds don't move — that it is wewho thunder past — there it is! an old vacation,a train ride — sense of immobility.as sky and forest scroll past in relation,we are not moved, pretend to love the view,resort at length to scripted conversationby a poet-turned-screenwriter who didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrongand now drafts action film scripts wholly two-dimensional unless you choose to don the 3d glasses that do not stay on —
Joshua Ip
Coming home to someone is many things. It is a literal action, an abstract idea, a physical feeling. It is more than the sound of the key turning in the door and the voice that calls from the porch. It is a choice, a promise, a declaration. It is a return, not as a person to a place, but as oneself to another. It is one person saying to another person: You are the one I choose.
Tania De Rozario
They seemed to be together as one, somewhere else in a place that was lighter than air.
Jess C. Scott
The human body is the best work of art.
Jess C. Scott
In the end, everyone came to the conclusion that however ungainly, however inefficient, however elliptical ASEAN's ways are, it's still better than not having an ASEAN. That is the genius of ASEAN foreign policy.
George Yeo
She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.
Jess C. Scott
Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music. . .Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby. . .After mother’s rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going.
Ang Swee Chai
Last night I was seriously considering whether I was a bisexual or not but I don’t think so though I’m not sure if I’d like to be and argh I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, if you like a person, you like the person, not their genitals.
Jess C. Scott
Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days’ time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The rush of life causes people to drown in the temporary. He wishes to dip into eternity before he leaves.
Isa Kamari
Please, touch me, I pray.
Jess C. Scott
Haw Par Villa is the nutty exception. It's mad, slightly unhinged and overwhelmingly rubbish. Without a doubt, Haw Par Villa is the Louis Tussaus House of Wax of Singapore. There is no higher compliment (...) For it's own sake, Haw Par Villa still had to be terrible, macabre, distasteful and offensive.
Neil Humphreys
The sensation of the ocean bearing my weight was the most carefree lightness I’d ever experienced. When we were halfway across the strait, the sound of an engine approached from a distance—it was probably the police coast guard. We quickly ducked under the surface of the water, exposing only the tips of our trunks so we could breathe.
Xi Ni Er
Inside a home you left me, a blue orphanage. Inside a bluish mosaic, space to live.
Heng Siok Tian
I am writing this on a computer that I can’t imagine living without. This is an alarming thought, the extent to which I have organised my life around a metal box full of wires (and, via the Internet, to many other metal boxes full of wires). Someone told me most of the Internet is stored in a warehouse somewhere in North Carolina. I don’t know enough about technology to gauge if this is true, but it made me realise how little I actually understand about the world I inhabit. The world of Dr Wong’s childhood was significantly smaller than mine, but he understood every square inch of it.
Jeremy Tiang
It seemed as if the mountains, wave after wave of them, were like the sea, going outward forever into distance, till, far away, they became engulfed in clouds, and joined—mountain and sky in one. Standing there on top, facing the enormity of the world, I thought of myself as a man. How boundlessly small we are…
Tan Kok Seng
My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.
Jess C. Scott
If all else fails, we then factor (fall) into our equation. And pray hard, someone factors (catching us) into theirs.
Noor Iskandar
You may be married to a star, but that doesn't mean they'll treat you like one.
Jess C. Scott
If this turns to friendship, it only meansThat one of us will suffer.That when we meet after the worst of endings,There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leavingBehind a bluer sky each moment of departure.And one of us will cling on to its blue,Hung on partings like a muted cloud, whileThe other rides on a wing of word away from here.
Cyril Wong
I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.
Jess C. Scott
One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.
Ng Yi-Sheng
Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order o make sense of the world around us?
Twang Eng Tan
Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it's dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we have only one life, it's important to kua kwee, to look spaciously. Not keep the eyes so narrowed down to the small dispairs.Those people who say forgive and forget, I say they not right. Not so simple. I say, find right medicine. Bitterness must be just right for problem. Then swallow it, think of good things can do when no longer sick.
Lydia Kwa
Start with putting three of your friends to jail. You definitely know what for, and people will believe you
Lee Kuan Yew
She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
You may disagree. Personal history and national history do not always overlap, a point often overlooked in some of the broad strokes applied to the SG50 celebrations. But do consider your choices. In the age of Buzzfeed, we love lists. Make your own. No two lists will be the same, but collectively, they all say the same thing. They are all in search of a soul.
Neil Humphreys
I’d thought there’d be no winter in the desert, but winter arrived anyway—silently, suddenly.
You Jin
I remember clearly the afternoon that she stood at the corner beside the door of the tourist centre in Gdansk.
You Jin
I'm not telling you to be quiet. I'm just saying that if you speak a little softer, we both might just hear what peace sounds like.
Noor Iskandar
It's weird, marriage. It's like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their 'other half.
Jess C. Scott
Yes, Doc, I'm not feeling too well.'Which was true enough, Kwang Meng considered.He had honestly not been feeling too well since he contracted poverty, loneliness, boredom, sexual frustration and periodic coughs and colds. Not to speak of his dreary job.
Goh Poh Seng
Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese.
Yeng Pway Ngon
Adrian had always found it amusing that a guy could be drilling Stacia up her ass while she considered herself to be a virgin. Her intent had been to present herself as such when she found "Mr. Right.
Jess C. Scott
To assure him, Peter Lim decided that the newsroom adopt this approach: it was better to produce the best story than the first story. He had good reason. Finding scoops in a Singapore with many OB markers carried a real risk: the story was sometimes incomplete or, as in the case of the bus fare increase, premature. For completeness, you sometimes incomplete or, as in the case of the bus fare increase, premature. For completeness, you sometimes had to rely on official spokesmen. But once they knew you were on the story, they either prevailed on the editors to hold it until the time was right to release it, or gave it to every newspaper. The edict went against the grain. No journalist could resist the temptation to be first with the news.
Cheong Yip Seng
So what if the airin Paris smells of romance?My shirt smells of you.
Pooja Nansi
Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.
Mohamed Latiff Mohamed
His grace is cheapened when you think that He has only forgiven you of your sins up to the time you got saved, and after that point, you have to depend on your confession of sins to be forgiven. God's forgiveness is not given in installments.
Joseph Prince