Quotes from F. Sionil Jose

It is easy to forgive a person his faults when he is dead because in death, he atones for his sins somewhat before the eyes of people who are still living and who have yet to add more on the parchment where their sins are listed.

I was shocked at the revelation of her vaulting ambition, her greed. I should have loathed her or, knowing what kind of a person she was, I should have realized the futility of any personal attachment, the impossibility of its maturing into something warm, human enduring. By then, I had known a bit of the prostitute's psychology, the ruthlessness which marked her relationship with men but I ignored these.

A revolution does not have to eat its children. In fact, it is those who are in power who could very well initiate revolutions. Let us not be old-fashioned and think only of armed uprisings of minorities as revolutions. Any movement that seeks to overhaul established attitudes is a revolution.

The Philippines just need 100 youth to stand up for their country

You will be surprised how much punishment the human body can take, if there is enough will - or faith.

the mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness.

Are You, then the God of white people, and if we who are brown worship You, do we receive Your blessings as white men do?

there are many things in this world that we cannot see, spirits that move about us, things we cannot explain, not even with the faith that we possess.

I pray that You be not white, that You be without color and that You be in all men because goodness cannot be encased only in white.

I knew long ago that their blood is the same as mine. No stranger can come battering down my door and say he brings me light. This I have within me.

The bravest are usually those whom we do not know or hear about, those anonymous men who dig the trenches, who produce the food. They are the corpus—you understand that word—the body and also the soul of a nation. Eustaquio, my words are just words, but all through history—and you have studied it—it has always been the most faceless men, those foot soldiers, who have suffered most, who have died. It is they who make a nation.

A nation which has people who can think, that nation already has strength. It is the mind which rules, Eustaquio -- not instinct or habit.

Virtue and wealth sometimes go together.

The greatest criminals are also the wealthiest men.

Epidermis, epidermis! How could it mean so much, when underneath, all blood was red?

You cannot ask the poor for sacrifices," I said. "We are already poor. What can we give? How do you measure the patriotism of the poor?

There is no adulation for a failed revolutionary, only a sympathy akin to pity or even contempt, not so much because he has failed but because he has lived so long.

Time will come that all that we love, we will eventually lose, and all that we hate we will eventually face.

I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this frequently; not between the inane idealism of the classroom and the stifling reality beyond it, which I must do for survival and self-respect. I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be and it is this commuting at lightning speed, at the oddest hours, that has done havoc to me.

There is a great promise for our cultural growth, but this promise is achieved only when our artists recognize that all great art has nationality, an imprimatur achieved with the keenest remembrance of time and place.

The importance not just of history, but of roots - that a writer must have then to nurture, to remember if he is to endure.

For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.

I regret that I have not written more, shouted louder, and acted out my beliefs.

The literary depiction of life and its moral dilemmas compel us to use our conscience, to make those infallible distinctions between right and wrong.