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 GENETErotic 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.
More Jean Genet Quotes
-
-
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
JEAN GENET -
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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 -
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
JEAN GENET -
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENET -
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET -
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET -
I’m homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENET -
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
JEAN GENET -
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
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