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Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Jean Genet

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

Greatness Imagination Man Universe Wild
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET

Experience Horny Morning
On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENET

Body Himself Move
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENET

Appearance Handsome Men Virtue
I’m homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
JEAN GENET

Eyes Myself Question Sexuality Silly
Betrayal is beautiful.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Betrayal One Liner
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENET

Convict Flower Relationship
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
JEAN GENET

Ideas Light Love Myself People
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.
JEAN GENET

Himself Home Street Talk
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET

Hide Language Ourselves Stretch Wrap
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENET

Calm Disturb Violence Yourself
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

End Gun Image Power Shadow Weapon
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Myself Recognition Thief
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

Blessing Evil Place Prison World
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
JEAN GENET

Coincidence Love Rare Worst
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

Hand Heart Myself Trap
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENET

Born Fake Image True
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

Feeling Flaw Follow Himself Man Remember Save
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

Beautiful Death Life Moments See
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
JEAN GENET

Betrayal Experience Happiness
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Monster Ornament Projection Purity Ugly
I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET

Disappear Lost Myself
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

Black Branch Country Hate Man Myself Plant
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

Cruelty Limitation World
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET

Devil Difference Smile
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENET

Break Poet Poetry Visible Writing
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

Happiness Knowledge Royalty Secret Solitude State Understand Vulnerable

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

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Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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