9 Quotes by Ninotchka Rosca

He saw clearly, immediately, that the man didn't care about the gift's value, didn't care about the gift even, but cared profoundly for the act of receiving as though the gift were a tribute, a confirmation of his self, his being, his reality. He found no pleasure in what he was taking but in the act of taking itself.

He was convinced that poverty was the only way of life for a certain category of people; they would die without it.

Better to exist without destiny, only to exist.

A man could love only what he respected, not pitied.

Do not tempt fate by saying never. Never again this, never again that—for you can never be sure of never and that's the only thing you can be sure of.

It is the living nature of resistance. It exists in a constant flux, changing, breeding, metastasizing. All information about it's internal processes is rendered obsolete by revelation.

To love was to regain the capacity to remember a world without names, to recall by virtue of the whorl above the beloved's knucklebones and to blue of the veins beneath the skin the unbearable fragility of mornings in this counrty, to find October odors trapped in the skinfolds between her toes along with the scent of talcum powder and soap and human sweat.

He saw clearly, immediately, that the man didn’t care about the gift’s value, didn’t care about the gift even, but cared profoundly for the act of receiving as though the gift were a tribute, a confirmation of his self, his being, his reality. He found no pleasure in what he was taking but in the act of taking itself.

He recalled the rifles without sights, the cross-purposes of wars, and the dark Malays who knew only the most simple, the most fundamental language of all- life, love and liberty -and who now would find themselves within the coils of power and politics.