Nick Joaquín > Quotes

“The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, May Day Eve and Other Stories

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“Love should have no alternatives; love should be the sole reason for loving; love should spring of itself.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Lovers: A Medley of Factual Romances, Happy or Tragical, Most of Which Made News

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels

“...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...”
― Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“I love" is a door girls slam in their fathers' faces.”
― Nick Joaquín

“I fell in love when I was twenty-six. Love in my interpretation comes once in a lifetime.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Lovers: A Medley of Factual Romances, Happy or Tragical, Most of Which Made News

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“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?”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“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...”
― Nick Joaquín, May Day Eve and Other Stories

“If your hands were not clean, your good actions had grimmer and more relentless consequences than your sins.”
― Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels

“The young look up to me as their feeder," said Alex. "Well, they can go look for another trough. I'm through with this hogwash."

"Are liberal ideas hogwash?"

"All ideas are hogwash, Jack."

"Don't you believe in anything anymore?"

"Sure. I believe in God the Father of Nonsense, creator of Crap and Nonsense, is now and ever shall be Crap without end. Oh, oh, Jack, how we break our hearts trying to make sense of a world that's pure and utter crap. But if you ever come to where I am now, you'll be surprised and delighted to find out how little anything matters."

"You've begun to sound Christian," said Pocholo.”
― Nick Joaquín, Cave and Shadows

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“People are all the fun in life" - Candido's Apocalypse”
― Nick Joaquin

“The movies can only, if they do anything at all, aggravate the damage. We deceive ourselves if we think that, by striking at the movies, we strike at the root of the evil. We cannot so easily shift guilt to the movie producers or the movie stars or the movie censors.

More censorship may be a cure that's worse than the disease, for we would be surrendering freedom of judgement in exchange for peace of mind. Not only our children but we ourselves may eventually find ourselves deprived of the right to distinguish for ourselves the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“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?”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.”
― Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“...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...”
― Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels

“- 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?”
― Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels

“The fatalism of the Filipino is usually passive, expressed in the classic proverb about our fortune coming to us though we seek it not. But the more complex form of that fatalism sees a man as being steered in a certain direction by one circumstance after another until he finally reaches a point when, though he acts voluntarily—or he thinks he acts voluntarily—he is actually being pushed by the circumstances that brought him to the point of action. The fatalist, as he looks back before he acts, sees everything as having conspired to make him perform that particular act, and therefore sees it as inevitable, as "fate". This is the amok mentality. Afterwards, what others regard as an act of will, the fatalist regards quite sincerely as a product of circumstances.”
― Nick Joaquín, Reportage on Crime: Thirteen Horror Happenings That Hit the Headlines

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, The Woman Who Had Two Navels

“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.”
― Nick Joaquín, Cándido's Apocalypse

“[...] 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?”
― Nick Joaquín, May Day Eve and Other Stories