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 GENETBeauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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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.
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They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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Erotic 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.
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The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
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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.
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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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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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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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Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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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 -
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 -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET