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 GENETErotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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I don’t want to disappear.
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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.
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Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
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Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.
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Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.
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I’m homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
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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.
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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.
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Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
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The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
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On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
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The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
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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.
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
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Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.
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Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET