Quote by Edith Tiempo: “Love is the courage to stay when everything in you says run.”

The instinct to protect yourself — to leave before you get hurt more, or to avoid the mess of another person's pain — is strong. But real love chooses to stay anyway, not from obligation, but from something deeper. That choice to remain present despite fear is what separates love from mere feeling.

Tiempo was writing during the period of Ferdinand Marcos's declaration of martial law in the Philippines in 1972, a political moment that tested all human bonds — friendships, families, communities — as people were forced to make choices about loyalty, complicity, and courage under authoritarian rule.

Filipino poet and fiction writer, born in Bayombong in 1919, and one of the most significant voices in Philippine literature in English. She co-founded the Silliman National Writers Workshop with her husband Edilberto Tiempo, shaping generations of Filipino writers, and received the National Artist Award for Literature in 1999.