Quotes from Gina Apostol

The sea is a memory. It is mesmerising. Its beauty is intolerable. What it buries is vaster than what it reveals. Every so often you get a glimpse of what you forget, or you wade in and something snags you, a broken shell or a sea urchin the fishermen missed...No waves speak with the same voice, though they share the same elements and motion, the regular beating of the surf, their rippling heaves.

She calls these reader moments the quibbles—when she gets stuck in the faulty notion that everything in a book must be grasped. Why should readers be spooked about not knowing all the details in a book about the Philippines yet surge forward with resolve in stories about France?

Foreign monopoly capitalism and the comprador bourgeoisie hinder the growth of industry: they must be opposed by the people's democratic revolution.

Everybody is messed up and occupied by others! Even if you are not Filipino! We are all creatures of translation, parallel chapters repeating in a universal void!

It is their country, sergeant. You only hold the keys.

At times, she feels discomfort over matters she knows nothing about, and Magsalin hears rising up in her that quaver that readers have, as if the artist should be holding her hand as she is walked through the story. But she rides the wave, she checks herself. A reader does not need to know everything

There will be unapologetic uses of generic types, actors with duplicating roles. Anachronisms, false starts, scarlet clues, a noirish insistence on the pathetic pursuit of human truths will pervade its miserable (quite thin) plot, and while the mystery will seem unsolved, to some it will provide the satisfaction of unrelieved despair.

There are consequences to your desires that you will regret, no matter how much you imagine your evils are unintended.

The strange scent of burning trailed the riverbanks down Balangiga, toward San Roque, out by Guiuan and Giporlos. The news spread through their noses, this sweet and terrible smell, this news that was not benevolent, the news of burning rice.

I would like to make a movie in which the spectator understands that she is in a work of someone else's construction, and yet as she watches, she is devising her own translations for the movie in which she in fact exists.

The Unintended, Professor Estrella Espejo points out, pushes the envelope: within the spiral of war and loops of art is an unknown war wrapped in another, a ghost in its machine.

For her uncles, she realizes, it is as if ever since she left the country for New York City—for nothing! not to send money home but just to "galavant!"—ever since she left she has relinquished her right to her memory of home, and she should not be left to her devices or she will bumble through the nation like a witless tourist who cannot speak its languages, though in fact she code-switches in three of them, puns in five, makes money in two, and dreams in one.