F Sionil Jose Quotes

Time will come that all that we love, we will eventually lose, and all that we hate we will eventually face.

There is a great promise for our cultural growth, but this promise is achieved only when our artists recognize that all great art has nationality, an imprimatur achieved with the keenest remembrance of time and place.

The importance not just of history, but of roots - that a writer must have then to nurture, to remember if he is to endure.

I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this frequently; not between the inane idealism of the classroom and the stifling reality beyond it, which I must do for survival and self-respect. I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be and it is this commuting at lightning speed, at the oddest hours, that has done havoc to me.

It was true then what Padre Jose had said, that there is evil in all of us, that only with faith and its capacity for exorcism can we master this evil. -Istak

I have tried to be very rational, although I know love and hate are not rational and explained feelings.

And old Padre Jose telling him to read as much as he could for the world was open only to those who could read and this skill was the most precious gift that any teacher could give. -Istak

Are you, then, the god of white people, and if we who are brown worship You, do we receive your blessings as white men do? I pray that You be not white, that You be without color and that You be in all men because goodness cannot be encased only in white.