Home > Author > Augusto Roa Bastos
1 " It is not by believing but by doubting that one can attain to the truth, which is ever changing form and condition. "
― Augusto Roa Bastos , I the Supreme
2 " Letters couldn't care less whether what is written with them is true or false. "
3 " To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real. "
4 " Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible. "
5 " The dictionary is an ossuary of empty words. "
6 " The great principle of Justice: prevent crime rather than punish it. All that is needed to execute a guilty man is a firing squad or a hangman. To prevent there being guilty men requires great astuteness. "
7 " -Quiero decir que me violaron y me arrojaron bajo un puente...-¡Parece de novela! -suspiró Sui.-Sí, muchacha. Todo lo que es verdadero parece de <>, aun cuando la novela sólo relata hechos ficticios, "
― Augusto Roa Bastos , Madama Sui
8 " -Quiero decir que me violaron y me arrojaron bajo un puente...-¡Parece de novela! -suspiró Sui.-Sí, muchacha. Todo lo que es verdadero parece de "novela", aun cuando la novela sólo relata hechos ficticios, "
9 " Él se había alejado de su casa a los once años para «descubrir el mundo»; pero ésa y sucesivas experiencias lo pusieron en camino de descubrir que en el mundo no hay nada peor que la maldad humana. "
― Augusto Roa Bastos , El trueno entre las hojas
10 " Man is an idiot. He doesn't know how to do anything without copying, without imitating, without plagiarizing, without aping. It might even have been that man invented generation by coitus after seeing the grasshopper copulate. "
― Augusto Roa Bastos
11 " Dicen que uno acaba pareciéndose a la imagen que los otros se forman de uno; peor sería que apareciesen en el rostro los estigmas de nuestras obsesiones y anhelos postergados, esos que forman nuestra verdadera pero oculta imagen. "
― Augusto Roa Bastos , El sonámbulo
12 " Escribir no significa convertir lo real en palabras, sino hacer que la palabra sea real. "
13 " The words of power, of authority, words above words, will be transformed into clever, lying words. Words below words. "
14 " Your passion for hurrying stems from your belief that you're always present at the present. He who proclaims himself his own contemporary is misinformed. "
15 " Words are dirty by nature. "
16 " You have not yet destroyed oral tradition only because it is the one language that cannot be sacked, robbed, repeated, plagiarized, copied. What is spoken remains alive. "
17 " The man who chooses to act pro bono suo, thereby turning a rule that was right into a wrong. that man is to be deemed a tirant, the wise king said, who, using the progress, wellbeing, and prosperitie of those he governs as a praetext, replaces the cultus of his people by that of his owne person, becoming thereby a fereful and fallacious pelican. His diabolical cunning turns those very men he doth claim to liberate into slaves. "
18 " I don't remember which writer of antiquity it is who speaks of an Old Woman-Devil, armed with a double set of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her sex. . . . What is the meaning of the vulva-with-teeth if not the devouring nonengendering principle of the woman? "
19 " Ah, this blasted habit of mine of inventing or deriving words! "
20 " The hierarchies of this army become corrupted or go rotten, if instead of placing themselves completely at the service of Revolution, they place revolution in their service and degenerate. . . . The malice of the militia seems to be forever the same. "
