Quotes from Nick Joaquín

Because it is so hard to keep the world going. There is always the temptation to abandon the effort altogether. For there is always the sowing and the harvesting, the building and the repairing, the falling down and the rising up again. Every day, everything has to be done all over again. In our world, it is always Monday morning.

People are all the fun in life - Candido's Apocalypse

People who confuse social behavior with manners naturally think of it as something that can be donned and doffed, a fashion that can be copied. But social behavior is nerve and bone, not clothes, and is never just a copy, however derivative it may look.

the prizing of the body, not as a minute to possess, in the rush of time, but as a being to love, in the light of eternity. Was this not the awful fate that lovers did not know they embraced when they cried For ever and ever?

Tolerance means to have the heart open to all differences; it is the honorable attitude of receiving another's opinion in order to appreciate it; it is the generous willingness to reach an agreement for the common good. Tolerance is the most precious virtue of democracy.

I believe, do you know, we never stop being what we were, young. We don't shed the young self, we just put on other skins, one cover after another, but somewhere in us is still the self we were before we fell, before we started covering ourselves. And all the rest of our lives, we're trying to go back, we're looking for it, what we lost.