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 GENETPower 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.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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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 -
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 -
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET -
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 GENET -
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
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 -
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENET -
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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 -
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
JEAN GENET -
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
JEAN GENET -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET -
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENET






