Miguel Syjuco Quotes

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

~ Miguel Syjuco

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Love and honesty don’t mix.

~ Miguel Syjuco

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

~ Miguel Syjuco

I transform fiction into memory.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

~ Miguel Syjuco

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child

~ Miguel Syjuco

I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the I. One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change.

~ Miguel Syjuco

When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They’re gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things.

~ Miguel Syjuco

A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.

~ Miguel Syjuco

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow--the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago

~ Miguel Syjuco

Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it

~ Miguel Syjuco

The instant before something comes into focus is more exciting than any sharp certainty. Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelessness is the task of music and painting. But a good photograph holds time just as a vase holds water. The water will evaporate and the vase becomes a memorial to it. What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience...

~ Miguel Syjuco

I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.

~ Miguel Syjuco

What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don't have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.

~ Miguel Syjuco