Randy Ribay Quotes

What if I don't have a clue what I want to do?" I ask.
"It takes time, I think. Follow your interests. Develop your strengths. Stay open to trying new things." She hesitates, then adds, "Maybe you haven't developed a passion yet because you've spent your entire life doing what others wanted you to do.

It was like he used all his compassion on strangers and ran out by the time he came home.

I've forgotten what it's like to be around so many people who look like me. I feel like I belong in a way I never do back in the States.

Maybe he was reaching out to me through those words, and I let him slip away. I stayed silent. If I had written to him more often, been more honest, would it have helped him work through some of his problems so he wouldn't have run away from home? Maybe if I tried to find him, I would have. Maybe he wouldn't have become an addict if someone were there for him.

Maybe he wouldn't have been killed in the street by the police, his death tallied as an improvement to society.

I expected the truth to illuminate, to resurrect. Not to ruin.

Kuya Jun had a way of making people pay attention, of making them realize that others existed outside of themselves and getting them to care.

It's a sad thing when you map the borders of a friendship and find it's a narrower country than expected.

It strikes me that I cannot claim this country's serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history. To say that any aspect of it is part of me is to say that all of it is part of me.

I will try not to judge because I have no idea what you were struggling with in your heart, what complicated your soul. None of us are just one thing, I guess.

What is the point, you know? People are sick and starving to death in our country, in our streets, and nobody cares.

My family, myself, this world - all of us are flawed. But flawed doesn't mean hopeless. It doesn't mean forsaken. It doesn't mean lost.

People are sick sand starving to death in our country, in our streets, and nobody cares. They worry instead about grades and popularity and money and trying to go to America. I don't want to be another one of those people who just pretends like they don't know about the suffering, like they don't see it every single day, like they don't walk past it on their way to school or work.

It's easy to romanticize a place when it's far away. Filipino Americans have a tendency to do that. Even me. Sometimes I miss it so much. The beaches. The water. The rice paddies. The carabao. The food. Most of all, my family.

You may not speak Tagalog or know as much as you would like about the Philippines, but if we'd stayed, you wouldn't have had all the opportunities that you've had here.

You saw my pain for what it was, recognized it as if it were your own, and gave me the love I needed to heal. I will never forget that.

That's not how stories work, is it? They are shifting things that re-form with each new telling, transform with each new teller. Less solid, and more liquid taking the shape of its container.