Miguel Syjuco earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and is completing his PhD at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He received the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and the Philippines’ highest literary honor, the Palanca Award, for the unpublished manuscript of Ilustrado. Born in 1976 into a political family in Manila, Syjuco left the Philippines to become a writer. He currently lives in Montreal with his girlfriend and their two cats.
It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.
Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.
To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.
Love and honesty don’t mix.
History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.
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.
To be angry implies you care,Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.
morality. . . comes at a price.
Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.
Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
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.
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,Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it,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. . .
