Patron Saints Of Nothing Quotes
"One thing dies, and another is born. Maybe the puppy’s soul now has wings."
"Sometimes my patients want me to lie for them. Nothing out of line. Mostly they want me to say something in a way that will give their loved ones relief. Or at least, something that won’t leave them with too much despair."
"It’s a sad thing when you map the borders of a friendship and find it’s a narrower country than expected."
"Everyone’s got their own shit to deal with, man."
"They are exterminating us like we are rats in the street."
"If people don’t speak out when something wrong is happening—wherever in the world—they’re helping whoever is committing that wrong by allowing it to happen."
"I’ve never truly confronted that question before, that I never had to."
"So we’re just going to act like this didn’t happen? Like Jun didn’t even exist?"
"Would there be justice? Definitely not if nobody even knows what truly happened."
"For the first time in a few days, I feel like I have the opportunity to do something that matters. Something real. Something for Jun."
"You guys always talk about how you learned so much from traveling. The best classroom is the world and all of that."
"What happened with Jun made me realize how little I know about Dad's side of the family, about that side of myself."
"I may not have learned to speak my native language from him, but I learned to keep the most important things inside."
"When you grow up in a country like the United States, you’re constantly told it’s the greatest place in the world. But then you go somewhere else one day and find out that bathroom doors like this exist, and you start to question everything."
"Sometimes I feel like growing up is slowly peeling back these layers of lies."
"The truth of what happened to Jun is under there somewhere. And its burial seems increasingly intentional the more I think about it."
"I can’t even begin to tell the differences between what people are speaking around me right now."
"This isn’t his home," she says. "It is in your blood, di ba?"
"We drive past the slums every day," he said to everyone, "and this boy has never actually stepped foot in them. It will be good for him to see how many of his countrymen live. To see how spoiled he is."
"It is very difficult to describe what the slums are like... Anyway, it is the kind of thing you need to experience for yourself to begin to understand. Like a full moon or a typhoon or love (so I am told)."
"But when I was handing out sandwiches, it made my problems go away for a time. It made me feel useful to the world in a simple way."
"Even if God does not exist, this woman has been doing good in His name so maybe it does not really matter."
"‘The boy does not need to be confused,’ he says in a feminine, mock-American accent meant to imitate my dad. ‘Christian will be going to America, so he needs only good English.’"
"If you do not know your mother tongue, you cannot know your mother. And if you do not know your mother, you do not understand who you are."
"When it starts to get old, it can somehow revert its cells to its younger state. It can keep doing that forever, theoretically."
"Follow your interests. Develop your strengths. Stay open to trying new things."
"They worry about my safety. About job prospects after I graduate. But it’s what I want to do, and they respect that."
"Isn’t that better than spending four years studying something you don’t care about to get a job you don’t really want to do for the rest of your life?"
"That article showed me I could use those skills to expose the truth and make the world a better place."
"So usually you would find someone else who might know something."
"‘Talaga?’ Mia says, looking at me with new interest. ‘Really?’"
"Together, we make a slow circle once around the rink."
"The fog now rises above most people’s heads."
"I’m starting to feel like I’m a couple more conspiracy theories away from claiming the US government faked the moon landing."
"We failed him in life. We should not fail him in death."
"I am not truly Filipino, so I don’t understand the Philippines."
"You can’t, like, force these things, you know?"
"And I just found this in one of his old books."
"Why don’t we ever read this kind of stuff in school?"
"I don’t know if there’s some mistake, maybe? The address he gave me is in the slums."
"The first sign of a good reporter is an unhealthy obsession with the truth."
"If I died right now, I will have died having done nothing and having helped nobody."
"But, basically, those here are living their lives. Doing the best they can with what they have, I suppose."
"In that universe, people do not die for doing what is right."
"He’s a runner, Jay. It’s obvious. Things get hard, and he leaves."
"It wasn’t fair of him to make that decision himself."
"Everyone groans with disappointment and assures me the machine is broken."
"I’m feeling so sad, I’m on the verge of crying."
"And it sounds stupid to say this, but I feel like I’m home."
"Surely the air your lungs first breathe matters. The language your ears first hear. The foods your nose first smells and your tongue first tastes. The soil you first crawl upon."
"It strikes me that I cannot claim this country’s serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history."
"Fuck those people who say being born somewhere doesn’t count if you didn’t grow up there."
"There’s something holy about this moment, this place."
"Your tatay is a quiet man, but he is not without a heart."
"Kuya Jun always said it was important that we remember everyone’s humanity. The world needs to know that all the people dying here are not nothing."
"In all of this, there is both beauty and sadness, light and darkness, pain and something that might be healing."
"And I’m hiding enormous portions of his life she knows nothing about."
"I think he always spoke the truth as he felt it."
"I don’t have that ability. I offer no reassurance, no wisdom. I only hug her tighter and start to cry with her. Maybe that’s what we both need right now."
"If we do not live according to what we feel is right in our hearts, then what is the point of any of this?"
"But maybe it’s time to dig it up. To let the sun hit the water. To let it flood."
"I was never there for Jun, but I’m here for Grace."
"All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle."
"People want to feel like they can do something, so they pray to these saints. I can understand that. And even if there are not actual magical spirits listening and waiting to fulfill our wishes, maybe just the act of thinking about these things changes us in some way."
"We are not doomed to suffer things as they are, silent and alone. We do not have to leave questions and letters and lives unanswered. We have more power and potential than we know if we would only speak, if we would only listen."