I the Supreme Quotes

“To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“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

“Forms disappear, words remain, to signify the impossible.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“Letters couldn't care less whether what is written with them is true or false.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“The dictionary is an ossuary of empty words.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“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.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“Escribir no significa convertir lo real en palabras, sino hacer que la palabra sea real.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“Words are dirty by nature.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“Five times every hundred years there is a February . . . without a [full] moon.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“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.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“Ah, this blasted habit of mine of inventing or deriving words!”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“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?”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“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.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“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.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“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.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme

“The words of power, of authority, words above words, will be transformed into clever, lying words. Words below words.”
― Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme