Back To Manila Quotes

Well, there’s an after-party,” he said, leaning back to look at her. “But I’m only stopping by for pictures, and then I’ve gotta fly to Manila.

Next time, just say something. It doesn't have to be the first date. Maybe the third or the fourth. Don't wait a year if you're sure. Certainty is sexy. And owning up to your attraction is sexy, too, and if you do it right and you're not creepy about it, I bet she will respect you for it anyway even if she does not like you back.

And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.

I read it over and over again. I turned it over, turned it back, smoothed it out on my pillow and then read it some more. It was written on a piece of torn-out spiral notebook paper. It had seams like it had been folded and unfolded a few times. I looked into the manila envelope again to see if there was anything else. There wasn't.

Why come back to this empty house, and this Manila with a strange face; the one I never knew? All those lonely islands. They will keep afloat without me.

All instincts told me to walk away and not look back. My life had been of numbing peace, of interminable serenity, and here was the promise of disruption, a little intermission in the monotony that my life had become.

But when I closed my eyes and pictured the house in that moment, it wasn't empty. The pastel depths of my mother's swollen closet lured me back. I went inside and peeked out between her hanging silk blouses at the rough beige carpeting of her bedroom, the cream ceramic lamp on her nightstand. My mother. And then I traveled up the hall, through the French doors, into my father's study: a dried plum pit on a tea saucer, a stack of papers he'd marked in red, mechanical pencils, yellow legal pads that flared open like daffodils. Journals and magazine and newspapers and manila folders, gummy pink erasers that struck me suddenly as somehow genital. Squat glass bottles of Canada Dry a quarter full. A chipped crystal dish of oxidizing paper clips, loose change, a crumped lozenge wrapper, a button he had meant to sew back onto a shirt but never did. My father.

times had changed. The chief impetus for rethinking the value of colonies was the global Depression. It had triggered a desperate scramble among the world’s powers to prop up their flagging economies with protective tariffs. This was an individual solution with excruciating collective consequences. As those trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed, falling by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. This was exactly the nightmare Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t. The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals. Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories. What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy. In fact, they were potentially a threat.

Special Agent Brent Meredith shut the thick manila envelope stuffed with photographs and written reports with a note of satisfied finality. Riley felt the same satisfaction, and she was sure that Bill and Flores did too. They were all seated at the table in the Behavioral Analysis Unit conference room. If only Riley weren’t bandaged up and hurting all over, the moment would have felt perfect. “So Dirk’s mother wanted a daughter instead of a son,” Meredith said. “She tried to turn him into a Southern belle. That was probably just the tip of the iceberg. God knows what else he went through as a kid.” Bill leaned back in his chair. “Let’s not give him too much sympathy,” he said. “Not everybody with a lousy childhood turns into a murderous sadist. He made his own choices.” Meredith and Flores nodded in agreement. “But does anybody know whatever happened to Dirk’s mother?” Riley asked. “Records show that she died five years ago,” Flores said. “His father disappeared long before that, when Dirk was still a baby.” A sober silence settled over the group. Riley understood exactly what it meant. She was in the presence of three people whose lives were devoted to destroying evil. Even in their satisfaction, the specter of more evil, and much more work to do, hung over all of them. It would never be over. Not

But the folders faded into a manila haze. The silver rim of Levi’s watch caught her eye. “Time is not the point . . .” The voice echoed in her ears and Aubrey took a step back.

Taylor said a prayer for the man, and apologized out loud. Knowing there was nothing left to do, she turned to leave. As she walked to the door, she spied a file folder, sitting apart from Stella’s cleaning supplies. “Stella, is this yours?” Stella was on the landing and shouted back to her. “Is what mine?” “The manila folder. Is that yours?” “Naw, I found it when I cleaned out the air intake for the air conditioner. There was some blood on the screen and it was inside when I took it off.” She appeared in the doorway. “You wanna take a look? I haven’t gotten to it yet.” Taylor

Faith is a praise unto God. I am deeply impressed with the area of praise in faith. A young man came to our church in Manila, Philippines, who had raised twelve people from the dead. “That’s not many,” he said. “There are people in Indonesia who have raised a hundred people from the dead.” Across the dinner table in our home I asked him, “Sir, how do you raise the dead?” He said, “We say a very simple prayer: ‘Lord, has this person lived out his days that You ordained? (Seventy at least.) Has he lived out his divine purpose?’ If the Lord says, ‘Yes,’ we bury the body. If the Lord says, ‘No,’ we say, ‘We’ll stop that right now. Death, hear us. We speak to you in the name of the glorious Son of God Who rose from the dead. Death, you leave him now! His life returns. We believe it, in Jesus’ name.’” That’s all they say. Then they hold hands, step back, and begin to sing. They sing until he gets up and joins them.

There was no anonymity in Manila. It was a big city, but it was a small city in many ways, too small for me back in the day. If I were in Manila, I wouldn’t be caught dead in the company of a beer-drinking stranger like you, especially like you in your bad boy jacket and your bad word shirt and your scruffy beard on a Saturday afternoon.

Once the libido was satisfied, humanity would flood back into the bloodstream and guilt, shame, and regret would usually flow throughout the being, replacing the lust, the lecherous desire, the maniacal impulses that had found their way out of the system through orgasm.

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.

The word ‘canvas’ comes from ‘cannabis.’ Anyway, here’s why marijuana became illegal.” Skye leaned forward as though telling us a secret. “It competed with wood, paper, and the newly invented nylon. It threatened the wrong people, like Randolph Hearst and the du Pont family. They lobbied against it, and cannabis was made effectively illegal in 1937 when it was taxed up the wazoo. The government changed its mind during World War II because the Japanese controlled the production of manila rope, made from hemp, and we needed to produce our own, but they turned the tax back on after the war.

adventure. Or maybe it’s just because I’m dumb. “No. I don’t know anything about Linus that might help you.” Colton folded his hands and exhaled slowly. “That’s a shame, because you seemed like a kid with common sense.” He stood from the desk and cracked his knuckles. I didn’t know what he was planning on doing, and luckily I didn’t have to find out. The speaker by the door crackled, and a girl’s voice spoke loud and clear. “Colton, to the front office please. Your bike is parked in a tow away zone. Colton, to the front office immediately.” “Blazes!” Colton shouted as he hopped off his seat. “My bike is in trouble?” As Colton started walking to the front door of the art room, I managed to sneak a peek at the page he had written notes on. The manila folder was open on the desk next to me. The paper on top was filled with chicken scratched words and doodles that looked like blueprints. Paper clipped to that sheet was my school picture. What the heck was my picture doing in his folder? Stopping at the door, Colton flipped around and headed back to the desk. Slapping the folder shut, he slid it along until it fell into his hand. “Don’t want to leave this thing sitting out, do we?” I didn’t answer, watching as he left the room. Before he disappeared out of view, I saw him say something to the

In 2016, when we started Build, Build, Build, critics said that the EDSA Decongestion Program is mathematically impossible, that it could not be done, that President Rodrigo Duterte was overpromising, and that Google Maps did not support such assertion. They failed to see the bigger picture — the possibility of a 90-year-old EDSA back to its original 1930s form, a future where Filipinos do not have to debate about Metro Manila’s “true midpoint” and a reality wherein every city in Metro Manila can be accessed within a 20 to 30 minute time frame

Back in 2016, when Build, Build, Build was just starting, a lot of people had doubts. One friend looked me in the eye and said, “This was another campaign promise meant to be broken.” We were likened to ardent suitors prepared to say anything. We could not blame them. At that time, it did seem impossible. Traffic in Metro Manila was costing us ₱3.5 billion a day. EDSA has exceeded its capacity by over a hundred thousand vehicles. Government projects were delayed for years — with some projects implemented only after several decades. But while we were all very familiar with this reality, it was not a reality we were prepared to accept. The Philippines was far from its full potential. To many of us, it was a chance to realize a dream. It was a chance to shape history and usher in the Golden Age of Infrastructure.

Potentially the weakest link in the long chain that led to Pearl Harbor was actually one of the strongest. This was the busy eyes of Ensign Yoshikawa, the ostensibly petty bureaucrat in the Honolulu consulate of Consul General Nagao Kita. Presenting himself as a Filipino, he washed dishes at the Pearl Harbor Officers Club listening for scuttlebutt. He played tourist on a glass bottom boat in Kaneohe Bay near the air station where most of the Navy’s PBYs were moored. He flew over the islands as a traveler. As a straight-out spy, he swam along the shore of the harbor itself ducking out of sight from time to time breathing through a reed. He was Yamamoto’s ears and eyes. The Achilles heel to the whole operation was J-19, the consular code he used to send his information back to Tokyo. And Tokyo used to give him his instructions. Rochefort, the code breaker in Hypo at Pearl Harbor, besides being fluent in Japanese could decipher eighty percent of J-19 messages in about twelve hours. The most tell-tale of all was message 83 sent to Honolulu September 24, 1941. It instructed Yoshikawa to divide Pearl Harbor into a grid so vessels moored in each square could be pinpointed. This so-called “bomb plot” message was relayed to Washington by Clipper in undeciphered form. The Pan American plane had been delayed by bad weather so 83 wasn’t decoded and translated until October 9 or 10. Washington had five times as many intercepts piling up for decoding from Manila than Honolulu because Manila was intercepting higher priority Purple. When he saw the decrypt of 83, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of the Far Eastern Section of Army G-2 or intelligence, was brought up short. Never before had the Japanese asked for the location of ships in harbor. Bratton sent the message on to Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the Army’s War Plans Division with General Marshall and Secretary Stimson marked in.

Back in 2016, when Build, Build, Build was just starting, a lot of people had doubts. One friend looked me in the eye and said, “This was another campaign promise meant to be broken.” We were likened to ardent suitors prepared to say anything. We could not blame them. At that time, it did seem impossible. Traffic in Metro Manila was costing us ₱3.5 billion a day. EDSA has exceeded its capacity by over a hundred thousand vehicles. Government projects were delayed for years — with some projects implemented only after several decades. But while we were all very familiar with this reality, it was not a reality we were prepared to accept. The Philippines was far from its full potential. To many of us, it was a chance to realize a dream. It was a chance to shape history and usher in the Golden Age of Infrastructure.” - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 112, Build, Build, Build Projects CAR Region)

We had reached the bathing pavilion. There I checked the bag, together with my watch and money, putting the two last-named articles in a big manila envelope and writing my name across the back. I received in exchange a numbered metal tag on a thick rubber band. I followed Bat Shayne’s example of putting this band around my neck, feeling just a little like a licensed dog as I did so.

what it meant.” “That’s fine.” Bosch moved to the drawer and looked in. There were two thin manila files and two packs of envelopes with rubber bands holding them together. The first file he looked through contained Eno’s birth certificate, passport, marriage license and other personal records. He put it back in the drawer. The next file contained LAPD forms and Bosch quickly recognized them as the pages and reports that had been removed from the Marjorie Lowe murder book. He knew he had no time to read them at the moment and put the file in the beer box with the other files. The rubber band on the first package of envelopes snapped when he tried to remove it and he was reminded of the band that had been around the blue binder that contained the case files. Everything about this case was old and ready to snap, he thought. The envelopes were all from a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Sherman Oaks and each one contained a statement for a savings account in the name of McCage

Mid June 2012 …Young, as time passed, I missed you more than ever. My exasperation with Toby festered with each passing day. When I finally could not tolerate our tempestuous relationship, I confronted the young man. After a heated emotional argument, Toby left our unfinished discussion in a state of vexation. I did not realize he was using the age-old psychological threat of overdosing himself to obtain my attention. I found him unconscious, foaming at the corner of his mouth from consuming an entire bottle of sleeping pills. He was rushed to hospital. I would not have been able to live with my guilt if Toby had died. He recovered from this ordeal, but my respect for him had plummeted. Instead of loving him, I felt sorry and pitied him. This was a malignant sign of what was to come. To appease him, we often kissed and made up after impassioned disputes. I made false promises that I had no intention of keeping. These desolate pledges soon dissolved into self-abhorrence. I had allowed myself to be trapped into a situation, and I could not figure out a solution. Throughout this ordeal, I threw myself into my engineering studies, channeling my unhappiness into what I enjoyed best. I could not give myself fully to the boy, and had little respect for him. When we made love, I shut him out. Instead, I saw you in our sexual liaisons. Toby was merely a vehicle to satisfy my sexual desires to be with you. Throughout the years we were together, it was you I made love to, not Toby or anyone else. I could not and would not release you from my mind. The pain of losing you was too oppressive, until the fateful day I suffered a nervous breakdown. I ended up in a hospital, in the psychiatric ward. Aria and Ari came to nurse me back to health. Aria stayed for two weeks until I could commence classes again. I knew I had to get away from this toxic relationship. The day I graduated I enrolled in a postgraduate program in Alberta, Canada. I desired to be as far away from New Zealand as possible; I needed to be away from Toby and to find myself again. I finally had a solid and legitimate excuse to separate from the boy. I was glad when Toby’s parents demanded their son’s return to the Philippines after his graduation so that he could take over his father’s business. Toby did not wish to return to Manila, but had no choice. His father threatened to cut off his financial support if he did not return. Thanks to universal intervention, my freedom was restored. I began a new life in Canada. That, my dearest Young, was the beginning of a new chapter in my life. The rest will be revealed to you in our next correspondence. For now, be happy, be well, and most importantly, be you at all times: the Young whom I love and cherish. Andy, Xoxoxo