Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
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I don’t want to disappear.
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There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET -
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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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.
JEAN GENET -
I’m homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
JEAN GENET -
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
JEAN GENET -
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
JEAN GENET -
What 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 GENET -
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
JEAN GENET -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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Limited 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 GENET -
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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It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET






