“Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.

The world is a possibility if only you’ll discover it.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

I blundered into writing.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting in my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance.

People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil-soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.

The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.

I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.

If the ways of the Almighty are not humanly logical, it is not the fault of the Almighty but of the limitations of human logic.

To be able to thank Allah for a blessing is a blessing within itself.

I contact Allah the Holy the Merciful on a daily basis.

It’s the Power of the Almighty, the Splendor of Nature, and then you.

No matter what face he wears, Satan has one overmastering ambition, one burning desire-to dethrone the Almighty and to place himself upon the highest throne of the universe.