Nick Joaquin Quotes & Sayings

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 Joaquin

I fell in love when I was twenty-six. Love in my interpretation comes once in a lifetime. — Nick Joaquin

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

Intramuros! The old Manila. The original Manila. The Noble and Ever Loyal City ... — Nick Joaquin

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

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino. — Nick Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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. — Nick Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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

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

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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. — Nick Joaquin

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 Joaquin

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 Joaquin