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 GENETWhat 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.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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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.
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It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
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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.
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 -
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
JEAN GENET -
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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.
JEAN GENET -
Betrayal is beautiful.
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I don’t want to disappear.
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They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
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Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
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Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
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To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
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






