I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENETI recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENETWhat I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see Negroes hanging from its branches.
JEAN GENETThough they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENETPower may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
JEAN GENETPoetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENETViolence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENETOn him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENETLimited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.
JEAN GENETThere is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENETRepudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.
JEAN GENETCrimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENETOne can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.
JEAN GENETAnyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
JEAN GENETI don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENETSlowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENETThe main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
JEAN GENET