Carlos Bulosan Quotes
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I came to know that in many ways it was a crime to be Filipino in California .... I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And this crime is that I am a Filipino in America.
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The human heart is bigger than the world.
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The old world is dying, but a new world is being born. It generates inspiration from the chaos that beats upon us all. The false grandeur and security, the unfulfilled promises and illusory power, the number of the dead and those about to die, will charge the forces of our courage and determination. The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living.
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Now culture being a social product, I firmly believe that any work of art should have a social function to beautify, to glorify, to dignify man... Since any social system is forced to change to another by concrete economic forces, its art changes also to be recharged, reshaped, and revitalized by the new conditions... The making of a genuine artist or writer is not mysterious. It is not the work of Divine Providence. Social conditions, history, and the people's struggle are the factors behind it.
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America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities are closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate-We are America!
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Men who had poetry in their soul come silently into the world and live quietly down the years, and yet when they are gone no moon in the sky is lucid enough to compare with the light they shed when they are among the living.