Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENETOn him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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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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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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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Betrayal is beautiful.
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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
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They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
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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.
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?
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Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
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Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
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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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The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
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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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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.
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Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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I decided to be what crime made of me.
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I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET