The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENETThere are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
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They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
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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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Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
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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.
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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 -
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 -
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 -
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENET -
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.
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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.
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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.
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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET -
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.
JEAN GENET -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET -
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
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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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Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENET -
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
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 -
It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
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 -
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