A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
JEAN GENETAdded to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
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To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
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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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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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If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
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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.
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Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
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I don’t want to disappear.
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I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
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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 -
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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 -
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
JEAN GENET -
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENET -
Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
JEAN GENET -
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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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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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 -
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
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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.
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?
JEAN GENET -
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENET -
On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENET