black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.

Jean Genet

Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.
JEAN GENET

Blessing Evil Place Prison World
Repudiating 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 GENET

Agreement Breathe Crime Hope Virtue World
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

End Gun Image Power Shadow Weapon
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
JEAN GENET

Fact Share Strange
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.
JEAN GENET

Happiness Knowledge Royalty Secret Solitude State Understand Vulnerable
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

Black Branch Country Hate Man Myself Plant
It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET

Break Day Let Go Myself Night
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET

Bold Dangerous Lying Name Violence
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

Fame Hero Pay Success
When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Death Life Moments See
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

Authentic Beauty Himself Man Quit Solitude Source Temporary Wound
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET

Devil Difference Smile
On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENET

Body Himself Move
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENET

Break Poet Poetry Visible Writing
I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET

Disappear Lost Myself
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

Hand Heart Myself Trap

It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.

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It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.

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