Top 70 Agustina Bazterrica Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

2. “Everyone says that he fell because he flew too close to the sun,” his father said, “but he flew, do you see what I mean, Son? He was able to fly. It doesn’t matter if you fall, if you were a bird for even just a few seconds.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

3. “The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

4. “The human being is complex and I find the vile acts, contradictions, and sublimities characteristic of our condition astonishing. Our existence would be an exasperating shade of gray if we were all flawless.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

5. “No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

6. “I don’t get why a person’s smile is considered attractive. When someone smiles, they’re showing their skeleton.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

7. “There is something about her he’d like to break.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

8. “It’s been a long time since he felt that this house was his home. It was a space in which to sleep and eat. A place of broken words and silences encapsulated between walls, of accumulated sadnesses that splintered the air, scraped away at it, split open the particles of oxygen. A house where madness was brewing, where it lurked, imminent.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

9. “I have always believed that in our capitalist, consumerist society, we devour each other.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

10. “Spanel has an arrested beauty about her. It disturbs him that there’s something feminine beneath the brutal aura she takes great care to give off. There’s something admirable in her artificial indifference. There’s something about her he’d like to break.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

11. “Ese era el discurso oficial. Las palabras con el peso necesario para modelarnos, para suprimir cualquier cuestionamiento, piensa.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

12. “He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

13. “Don’t be an idiot. Can’t you see they’re controlling us? If we eat each other, they control overpopulation, poverty, crime. Do you want me to keep going? I mean, it’s obvious.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

14. “Does this pose a moral dilemma for you? Do you find it atrocious?” he asks. “Not at all. The human being is complex and I find the vile acts, contradictions, and sublimities characteristic of our condition astonishing. Our existence would be an exasperating shade of gray if we were all flawless.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

15. “He wishes he could anesthetize himself and live without feeling anything. Act automatically, observe, breathe, and nothing more. See everything, understand, and not talk. But the memories are there, they remain with him.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

16. “Naming children after their parents is stripping them of an identity, reminding them who they belong to.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

17. “How many head do they have to kill each month so he can pay for his father’s nursing home? How many humans do they have to slaughter for him to forget how he laid Leo down in his cot, tucked him in, sang him a lullaby, and the next day saw he had died in his sleep? How many hearts need to be stored in boxes for the pain to be transformed into something else? But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing. Without the sadness, he has nothing left.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

18. “After all, since the world began, we’ve been eating each other. If not symbolically, then we’ve been literally gorging on each other. The Transition has enabled us to be less hypocritical.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

19. “How many hearts need to be stored in boxes for the pain to be transformed into something else? But the pain, he intuits, is the only thing that keeps him breathing. Without the sadness, he has nothing left.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

20. “There are times when one has to bear the weight of the world.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

21. “They gave human meat the name “special meat.” Instead of just “meat,” now there’s “special tenderloin,” “special cutlets,” “special kidneys.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

22. “This is what his sister’s going to get: an urn full of dirty sand from an abandoned zoo with no name.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

23. “Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything. He wishes he could hate someone for the death of his son. But who can he blame for a sudden death? He tried to hate God, but he doesn’t believe in God. He tried to hate all of humanity for being so fragile and ephemeral, but he couldn’t keep it up because hating everyone is the same as hating no one.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

24. “His sister’s words accumulate, one on top of the other, like folders piled on folders inside folders.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

25. “The planet is going to burst at any minute. You’ll see, Son, it’s either going to be blown to bits or all of us are going to die from some plague.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

26. “No one can be sure of anything. Let them eat me, I’ll give them horrible indigestion.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

27. “The words are there, encapsulated. They’re rotting behind the madness.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

28. “There’s something admirable in her artificial indifference. There’s something about her he’d like to break.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

29. “The mask of apparent calm, of mundane tranquility, of the joy, at once small and bright, of not knowing when this thing I can skin will be ripped off, when this thing I call mouth will lose the flesh that surrounds it, when these things I call eyes will come upon the black silence of a knife.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

30. “She was horrified by the traces of monstrosity in everyday life. The things that we look at but don’t see, whose true essences are unknown to us.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

31. “He felt that a slaughterhouse should go unnoticed and blend in with the landscape, that it should never be called what it really is.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

32. “We are the worst kind of vermin, destroying our planet, starving our fellow man.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

33. “I know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

34. “His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

35. “One word to sum up and classify the unfathomable. An empty word. Change, transformation, shift: synonyms that appear to mean the same thing, though the choice of one over the other speaks to a distinct view of the world.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

36. “His gaze is opaque, as though behind the impossibility of uttering words madness lurks.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

37. “He thinks that senor urami doesn’t look at people and instead measures them.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

38. “The craving for meat is dangerous.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

39. “There’s a vibration, a subtle and fragile heat, that makes a living being particularly delicious. You’re extracting life by the mouthful. It’s the pleasure of knowing that because of your intent, your actions, this being has ceased to exist. It’s the feeling of a complex and precious organism expiring little by little, and also becoming part of you.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

40. “His father is a person of integrity, that’s why he went crazy.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

41. “I’m surrounded by death, all day long, at all hours of the day,” she says, and points to the carcasses in the fridge. “Everything indicates that my destiny is in there. Or do you think we won’t have to pay for this?” “Then.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

42. “His sister’s words are like boxes filled with blank paper.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

43. “Because hatred gives one strength to go on; it maintains the fragile structure, it weaves the threads together so that emptiness doesn’t take over everything.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

44. “But then he questions, yet again, why he exposes himself to this. The answer is always the same. He knows why he does this work. Because he’s the best and they pay him accordingly, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, and because his father’s health depends on it.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

45. “He goes out to untie the female from the tree where he left her. She hasn’t taken the rope off her neck. Of course, he thinks, she doesn’t know she can. He moves toward her and she begins to tremble. She looks at the ground. Urinates. He takes her to the barn and ties her to the door of a broken and rusted truck.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

46. “Can’t you see you’re incapable of thinking for yourself? The only thing you do is follow the norms imposed on you. Can’t you see that this whole thing is a superficial act? Are you even capable of feeling something, really feeling it? I mean, have you ever cared about Dad?”

— Agustina Bazterrica

47. “Dr. Valka looks at him with surprise. He’s always been attentive, always listened to her and said what needed to be said, no more, no less, so that she felt he was interested. Dr. Valka never asks shim how he’s doing or if everything is okay, because she only sees him as a reflection of herself, a mirror into which she can keep talking about her achievements.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

48. “Outside the secure space of the circle, vulgarity accumulates. Ada loathes vulgarity because it’s there that misery hides. She knows that misery is destructive and, as such, ephemeral.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

49. “He doesn’t call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product.”

— Agustina Bazterrica

50. “Time stifles in this place. The hours and seconds stick to the skin, pierce it. Better to ignore its passing, though that’s not possible.”

— Agustina Bazterrica