Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official Quotes

“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

“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

“I wanted to ask why you were lonely, but what would I say if you asked me the same question?”
― 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

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

“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

“The world died in a fit of coughing, in a series of painful, breathless gasps, in a tragic symphony of wheezing and whooping.”
― 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

“All I want are little changes, like uniforms for the garbage collectors, or masks or gloves. Gloves, especially! I cringe seeing them smoking with their bare hands after handling all that filth.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Like flowers bursting out of buds, more of life returns and I believe more danger awaits us. But such is the nature of our life. Danger is nothing new to us. It’s a part of what we face in the day-to-day, no stranger than eating or mating or being born.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“If I were in Manila, I doubt I would ever have to make a trip to the grocery alone. There would be family—sisters, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, in the absence of whom, amigas, yayas, even drivers could be counted on… If I were in Manila, instead of here, I would never have enough time to sit alone on a bench on the sidewalk or walk down the street or ride trains by myself. I would be chauffeured. I would be chaperoned. I would spend Sunday afternoons playing mah-jong or having tea or shopping or exchanging gossip with my friends, rather than sweeping floors or doing the laundry or tending to the garden or overseeing the work of some enterprising teen shoveling the snow off the front yard.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“But Manila was another life. It was another time. It was universes behind me. The woman who lived there, sheltered and shackled and dreaming of another place, such as this, this magical spot under the start-of-autumn sky adorned with brown leaves preparing for their eventual descent to the earth, this quiet side street near the busy, bustling Old Port in old Quebec, was no longer me.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“What were you thinking when you looked at me, scanning my face like the cover of a book? What was I thinking every time I looked away, as if those eyes would devour me, betray my secrets, steal my soul, reveal the pages of my life like an open book?”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“The first time Elias flipped through a porn magazine, he literally trembled in shock, unable to accept that it was possible his mother spread her legs, too, to accommodate his father, or else there would be none of him or his sisters.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official

“At night, touching himself, he would imagine her in every carnal detail, always determined he would see her at last, on Erzèbet Square, but always, once he was done, he would be consumed by guilt, which would not replace the fantasy, only dissipate it, and he would decide she was just an itch he could scratch away so easily without harming her or himself.”
― A.A. Patawaran, Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official