“You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.”

“The first two things Gaudencio Rivera was made aware of–within hours of arriving by carabao-drawn cart at the secluded town of Tagbaoran on the island province of Palawan–were these: that the most beautiful woman in creation dwelt by the river, and that it was pointless to even dream of being loved by her.”

“We cannot be indifferent to the evil in our society.”

“Kalau manusia sama sekali tidak pernah merasa putus asa, kita tidak akan tahu bagian mana dari diri kita yang tak sanggup kita singkirkan. Lalu kita akan tumbuh dewasa tanpa benar-benar mengerti apa saja yang bisa membuat kita gembira. Aku bahagia karena bisa menderita”, Eriko (Kitchen)”

“Nationalism is a fake word , it’s nothing more than a thought which increase a higher level of ego and supremacy which forces to feel that the area, boundary and culture where i belong is the most superior in the entire world. A word which fills our brain and heart with Absolutely irrationality”

“I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.”

“Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.”

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.”

“The cry that ‘fantasy is escapist’ compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are ‘escapist’ compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.”

“My dear Scipio and Laelius. Men, of course, who have no resources in themselves for securing a good and happy life find every age burdensome. But those who look for all happiness from within can never think anything bad which Nature makes inevitable.”

“If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.”

“Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn’t a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.”

“Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just”

“In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one’s surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.”