Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
JEAN GENETAnyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
JEAN GENET -
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
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My heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.
JEAN GENET -
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENET -
Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.
JEAN GENET -
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET -
Betrayal is beautiful.
JEAN GENET -
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET -
Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude.
JEAN GENET -
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
JEAN GENET -
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENET -
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
JEAN GENET -
I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET -
On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENET -
One 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 GENET -
The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.
JEAN GENET -
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
JEAN GENET -
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENET -
If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
JEAN GENET -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET -
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
JEAN GENET -
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
JEAN GENET -
Power 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 GENET