#philippines

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? ↗

— Miguel Syjuco

#philippines #life

Doreen Fernandez' foreword to "Rizal Without the Overcoat": His essays remind us that history need not and should not be relegated to schoolbooks and classrooms, where it often becomes a set of names and dates to memorize and spew out on test papers. History is a living and lively account of what we were and are; it could and should be as real to each of us as stories about family or about recent and past events.. If all of that makes us understand humanity better, so does history make us understand ourselves, and our country infinitely better, in the context of our culture and our society. ↗

— Ambeth R. Ocampo

#philippines #rizal #dating

We soon fall asleep in each other’s arms, knowing to myself that I captured her, like a prisoner in a cage. ↗

— Fernando Lachica

#dubaicity #hatred #life #love #lust

Life is a continuous feeling wherein something you work for it to be happy in terms of your soul. ↗

— Fernando Lachica

#dubai-city #family #filipinos #love #ofw

Rizal" is a compulsory course in school, but few teachers make Rizal's novels interesting. If students are taught to enjoy Rizal's works as literature instead of as a lodemine of 'patriotic' allusions I am sure they would not mind reading and rereading the 'Noli me Tangere'. ↗

— Ambeth R. Ocampo

#philippines #rizal #literature-quotes

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made. ↗

— F. Sionil José

#philippines #poverty #prostitution #social #women

The Philippines is a terrible name, coming from Spain. Phillip II was the father of the inquisition, who I believe died of syphilis. It is my great regret that we didn't change the name of our country. ↗

— Imelda Marcos

#change #coming #country #died #father

The Marcos era was the golden time for the Philippines. We had the lowest crime rate in the world in Manila and real development then. At last, people are starting to understand this. ↗

— Imelda Marcos

#crime rate #development #era #golden #had

As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct. ↗

— Ambeth R. Ocampo

#learning #philippine-history #philippines #rizal #school

Drained of faith, I kneel and hail thee as my Lord, I ask not life, thou need not swerve the bullet, I ask but strength to ride the wave, and one more thing, teach me to hate ↗

— Henry G. Lee

#philippines #world-war-ii #faith