Quotes from Nick Joaquín

Love should have no alternatives; love should be the sole reason for loving; love should spring of itself.

I love" is a door girls slam in their fathers' faces.

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

The world was always going to be remade by people who were too busy to remake themselves first and who left the world twice as miserable as before.

Love should have no alternatives; love should be the sole reason for loving; love should spring of itself.

Environment is what you make it and destiny is how you react to your environment: whether you try to overcome it or just resign yourself to it.

When he had gone home, he had been frightened, he had refused to face what he saw. But he had not really wanted to come home to a land, only to a pas; and not finding the past there, he had run away, fearing the reality, preferring the dream.

and that there were many things grow-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye.

I fell in love when I was twenty-six. Love in my interpretation comes once in a lifetime.

If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life... The rift is... between folk culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.

BUT, alas, the heart forgets; the heart is distracted; and Maytime passes; summer ends; the storms break over the rot-ripe orchards and the heart grows old; while the hours, the days, the months, and the years pile up and pile up, till the mind becomes too crowded, too confused: dust gathers in it; cobwebs multiply; the walls darken and fall into ruin and decay; the memory perishes...

When we say that the West has brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil that the guisado is evil?

No individual existence can be traced further than the moment of conception, which determined that what was to be born would be this person and no other. The person may change from baby to child, and from boy to man, but through all these changes he will remain this person and cannot be another, because all possibilities to the contrary that may have existed before the moment of conception ended forever with the moment of conception.

If your hands were not clean, your good actions had grimmer and more relentless consequences than your sins.

The cinema is, after all, the most timid of the arts. It never sets trends, it merely reflects them. The harm has been done long before the movies set cameras on the scene. Warring teen-age gangs antedated Rebel Without A Cause , at least in the United States; and the most infamous teen-age killer in Philippine history operated during the liberation times, long before James Dean was heard of.

If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.

Shouldn't we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?

This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

But they were corrupt, Father! - They were human, my child. And if we were to reject all worldly authority for that reason, we would have to reject everything: marriage and government and society; the family, the state, and the church. We would have to abolish the world. Is that what you propose to do?