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Manila Quotes

Browse 76 quotes about Manila.

Manila Quotes

“He managed to find some mango varieties on the outskirts of Manila that he thought people might appreciate in Florida. His instinct turned out to be sharp when the carabao mango, as sweet as candy and not too fibrous, became known as the "champagne mango" in warm states that could grow it. Its slender body and buttery flesh shocked American taste buds that had never tasted anything so saccharine aside from pure sugar. The mango left such an impression on growers and breeders that its genes found their way into almost every American mango variety for the next century, the stuff of plant breeding dreams.”

SweetFruitFloridaManilaMangoes
Book:The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats
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“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.”

FictionShort StoryPhilippinesFilipinoAmsterdamDiasporaManilaRed Light DistrictThe Last Temptation
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“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.”

PhilippinesQuebecManilaFilipinosAlmostromance
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“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.”

RomanceFictionShort StoryPhilippinesFilipinoEstrangementManilaPhuketWorld Affair
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“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.”

FictionShort StoryPhilippinesFilipinoManilaHigh Society
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“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.”

FictionShort StoryPhilippinesAthensDiasporaManilaPan De Regla
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“He knew this was bound to happen but he kept himself at a safe distance, though he saw it come in every possible form, in trees felled to make way for new streets or cities, in chemicals that mimicked the human cells to invade the body, in every huff and puff of a CO2-emitting vehicle. What about the evil armies raised in the robotics classes of kindergarteners? What about the fake food with which the children had been fed? What about the devil winning the people’s vote on a ticket of broken promises, empty threats, and outright lies and a mission to send them straight to hell?”

FictionShort StoryEnd Of The WorldVenicePhilippinesFilipinoManilaOutbreakPanic On The VaporettoVenice Biennale
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“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.”

FictionNew YorkShort StoryPhilippinesFilipinoManilaCountdown To A Kiss
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“Here, then, happiness is obviously a form of strength, a subversion even, a modus of survival, even if at times it appears superficial and misplaced. Besides, for all of boxing's brutality, there is lyricism in its rhythm, too, something that dreamy, romantic Filipinos perhaps recognize. It is almost too facile to ascribe too much significance in this metaphor, but this incongruous combination of lyrical violence is default in Manila, where beauty is scarce, and which flourishes side by side with the hideous. There is pride in that stubborn independence, I think, whether it is on the canvas of a boxing ring or history. How did that killer song end again? The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.”

ViolenceBoxingManila
Book:The Quiet Ones
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“The PBA was a symptom of the Philippines' basketball obsession, not the cause. I was thrilled to be witnessing the professional game from inside Alaska's locker room, but that wasn't what brought me to Manila in the first place. I was inspired by the idea that a Southeast Asian nation populated by five-foot-five men and mostly forgotten by America except for its political corruption, widespread prostitution, and violent Muslim separatist movement could be devoted to hoops with a passion unequaled by any other country. It was a nationwide tale of unrequited love. Forty million short men obsessed with basketball--they might as well have been a nation of blind art historians.”

BasketballPhilippinesManilaHoops
Book:Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball
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“I am almost thirty, never been in love, at least not enough to stay in love through the foul moods, the oppressive silences, the subjugation, the acquiescence, the petty fights, the nagging questions, all the other complications that tend to get factored into a relationship once it stews in time, simmering to a boil.”

RomanceFictionShort StoryBerlinLgbtqiaPhilippinesFilipinoDiasporaManilaOn A Sunday In August
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“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.”

FictionPhilippinesFilipinoDiasporaQuebecManilaAlmost Romance
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“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.”

FictionShort StoryPhilippinesFilipinoDiasporaManilaFlash Flood
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“It was then that it dawned on my great-great-great-great-grandmother that Avenida in Santa Cruz—with all its dark, dank, dreary alleyways, its patchwork of cheap cement, cheaper wood, and even cheaper corrugated iron that passed for houses, its ground littered with all sorts of scrap, including crumbs of goodies and morsels of meals to which they were never invited, its all-present humidity and intermittent rain, all its mud and flood on rainy days and all its dust on dry days, all its dirt, all its noise, and all the cruelty and fear and abomination and prejudice—was paradise.”

Short StoryPhilippinesFilipinoSpeculative FictionDiasporaManilaThe Nameless
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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