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“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, Ilustrado

“And yet—and yet—she enchants me, intrigues me, draws me like sin to hellfire.
The infernal regions in the hollow between her breasts, wet and warm, dark and dense, offers delicious emptiness, captivating, overpowering, like the bottom of a well, the abyss beneath a hanging bridge on a dreary, gloomy day when all hope is gone and death is like the serpent in Eden.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“He has killed me since he married me.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“Anton does not have a need to give our home a touch of anything British. This British man living in this house, with his blind devotion to—his love affair with—not the Orient, but his idea of the Orient, colored by its history, its culture, its underdog-now-having-its-revenge role in world affairs, is all the British this house ever needs.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“On days she is half-lucid, Rob finds Manika a bore, too self-absorbed and a little shallow, removed from reality, a spoiled kid from Manila, where she is heiress to billions—or stolen billions, as his father would say.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“Ah, all these women and not a pair of lips to kiss”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“On days her spirits are low, like now, or between ballet seasons, when she has time to think about herself outside of the roles she plays, when she is not Odette in Swan Lake or Clara in The Nutcracker, she finds her feet reason enough to doubt the grace for which she is applauded when she spins on the tips of her toes.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“The show is over, but she cannot bring herself to even slow down. The more she thinks about quitting, the louder the applause, the longer the standing ovations, and the higher the expectations go.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“No, not really, not to change it, not to forget it, or rewrite it, but to remember it with caution so it is not too harmful to keep in mind.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“I turned anti-American. I joined the European chorus of disdain for America. And because, like many other Filipinos, including practically every Philippine president from the time of Emilio Aguinaldo, my father was a true disciple of the Great American Dream, I turned against him, too, as I thumbed my nose at the Americanization of the world.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“Here in Greece, I am now surrounded by ancient memories in slabs of stone, cold and lifeless and enduring, but where I grew up, my memories could have been warm as a toast, fluffy as freshly baked muffins, and as homey as the smell of bread wafting from the ovens.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“And so here it was, one of them bleak futures the Venice Biennale had flirted with in a bid to showcase the painful truths of the age.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“He knew this was bound to happen but he kept himself at a safe distance, though he saw it come in every possible form, in trees felled to make way for new streets or cities, in chemicals that mimicked the human cells to invade the body, in every huff and puff of a CO2-emitting vehicle. What about the evil armies raised in the robotics classes of kindergarteners? What about the fake food with which the children had been fed? What about the devil winning the people’s vote on a ticket of broken promises, empty threats, and outright lies and a mission to send them straight to hell?”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“Until you have trains or planes or buses that arrive or depart as scheduled, I don’t think you can ever move forward or even move at all”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“Like the conquistadores of my cultural history, Anton took me into his arms, along with everything I represented, including my dark skin, what he called my 'Japanese eyes,' and colonized me...”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“I’m afraid your memories of me are unfair.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“But politics has no space in Rob’s mind right now or ever. Neither do his migrant roots nor does the Philippines, with which his parents maintain a sentimental bond and to which, while he was growing up, they tried to endear him, speaking to him in a mix of Tagalog and Bicolano, of which he remembers not a word, except Mabuhay and magayon, salamat, too, and taking him as often as they could on vacations to famous Philippine beaches, fiestas, and other sites, including Christmas in Manila.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“It should be nice to give her that kiss on New Year's Eve, but Patrice is married—to her second husband. Too much fish in the sea to bother with this one, at least not tonight.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“I mean exactly. I'm worried about that child. You want your child to be wild, you bring her to the jungle.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“Not the Manila you see on CNN or BBC, whose interest in Manila or the Philippines is mostly limited to its poverty or its morally bankrupt political system or its many Climate Change-induced disasters.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“t must be irony that, now that he is back in Manila, poverty is almost a complete stranger. Even his Mamita, the woman who has taken care of him since he was born and who took personal care of his mother before him, is not that poor, at least not desperately poor, in Miko’s estimation.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“This is not New York. He does not need to fold in on himself to fit in a studio. He does not need to fend for himself. He does not need to go home to a dark place, where he needs to switch on the light upon arrival every night, and where no hot, homecooked meal awaits him. This is Manila, his home of luxury.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“He took pleasure in scandalizing the moralists in his circles, arriving at soireés in the arms of paid escorts whom he dressed up for the occasion not exactly to make them blend in but to make them stand out.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“When we do not know who we are, how do we relate to other nations as their equal, how do we know what our fair share is in international trade, how do we even know what’s best for us come election time.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“The buzz about the ball has risen to such a fever pitch that two weeks before the event those who had not received an invitation booked themselves a last-minute flight out of town—to Balesin or to Amanpulo or to Pangulasian in El Nido—or out of the country, Hong Kong or Singapore or as far as Tokyo.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“The pundits say that Manila! Manila! is the unwitting revenge of high society, under a new republic whose leader won the presidential elections by a landslide on a platform of social equality and poverty alleviation.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“He managed to find some mango varieties on the outskirts of Manila that he thought people might appreciate in Florida. His instinct turned out to be sharp when the carabao mango, as sweet as candy and not too fibrous, became known as the "champagne mango" in warm states that could grow it. Its slender body and buttery flesh shocked American taste buds that had never tasted anything so saccharine aside from pure sugar. The mango left such an impression on growers and breeders that its genes found their way into almost every American mango variety for the next century, the stuff of plant breeding dreams.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“Rain in Metro Manila is like a love affair: Short and fleeting; or torrid and flooding with tragic casualties left in its wake.”
― John Pucay, Karinderya Love Songs

“Inside the saloon, a band of plump, middle-aged gentlemen in Stetson hats and leather jackets crooned about an Ibaloi girl from Bahong.

Like the roses of Bahong
Ambrosial and winsome
If they uproot it and bring it to Manila
They will kill it

They sang in mellow, baritone voices.”
― John Pucay, Karinderya Love Songs

“In Intramuros, and only in Intramuros, does he ever feel at rest. He thinks to himself here are the ancient stones of Manila; here are the secrets whispered by heroes to their paramours; here, they have plotted revolutions by candlelight, in air punctuated by mosquitoes, and harm, and roses”
― Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Assembling Alice