Miguel Syjuco (born November 17, 1976) is a Filipino writer from Manila and the grand prize winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize for his first novel Ilustrado.
History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.
Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.
Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.
Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it
You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?
Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love.
I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough.
Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.
We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.
Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.
Love and honesty don't mix.
I dont see myself as any different from all the other Filipinos who have gone abroad looking for opportunity, to be a nurse, a labourer, a maid or a prostitute.
Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.