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 GENETThere 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.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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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.
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 -
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 -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET -
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENET -
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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 -
I don’t want to disappear.
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 -
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.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
JEAN GENET -
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENET -
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENET -
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENET -
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
JEAN GENET -
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET -
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENET -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET -
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
JEAN GENET -
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.
JEAN GENET -
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
JEAN GENET