Quotes from Augusto Roa Bastos

The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

It is not by believing but by doubting that one can attain to the truth, which is ever changing form and condition.

Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible.

Letters couldn't care less whether what is written with them is true or false.

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.

The dictionary is an ossuary of empty words.

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.

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.

Quiero que en las palabras que escribes haya algo que me pertenezca. No te estoy dictando un cuenticulario de nimiedades. Historias de entretén-y-miento.

The words of power, of authority, words above words, will be transformed into clever, lying words. Words below words.

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.

Words are dirty by nature.

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.

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.

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?

Ah, this blasted habit of mine of inventing or deriving words!

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.

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

Five times every hundred years there is a February . . . without a [full] moon.

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

Atravesó capas y capas de sufrimiento humano. Y encontró que la gente más martirizada era la más buena y noble. Pero encontró también que esta bondad y esta nobleza estaban tan degradadas y envilecidas que eran una cosa inútil y que, a menos que se rebelaran violentamente, seguirían siendo siempre una cosa inútil.

There is always time to take more time.