Augusto Roa Bastos Quotes

14 quotes in 219 categories

• Letters couldn't care less whether what is written with them is true or false.
• 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…
• Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.
• The things that have come into being change continually. The man with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing.
• What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them
• There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes,…
• Facts can't be recounted; much less twice over, and far less still by different persons. I've already drummed that thoroughly into your head.
• 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…
• In all nations an exceptional man exists that compensates the deficiencies of the remainder. In those moments, when humanity is found collectively in a state…
• Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible.
• 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.

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