Nick Joaquin Quotes

If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself.

An age that needs security guards is, of course, without security.
What do we have in the dull old days? Old man janitors in the schools; watchmen in the factories, and the watchman was usually the turbanned bearded Bombay armed only with a stick, drowsing on a stool by a gate. How his strong odor remembered now seems the very smell of safety!
In his place now lurks the man in uniform, armed with pistol and club and submachine gun: the "security" that stands for the insecurity of our times, being the human equivalent of the iron bars at the window, the barbed wire on the wall.

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?

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.

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.

The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.

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.

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?

People who confuse social behavior with manners naturally think of it as something that can be donned and doffed, a fashion that can be copied. But social behavior is nerve and bone, not clothes, and is never just a copy, however derivative it may look.

I love is a door girls slam in their fathers' faces.

Love should have no alternatives; love should be the sole reason for loving; love should spring of itself.

If your hands were not clean, your good actions had grimmer and more relentless consequences than your sins.

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.

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

People are all the fun in life - Candido's Apocalypse

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.

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.