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Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.

Jean Genet

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.
JEAN GENET

Agreement Breathe Crime Hope Virtue World
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
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENET

Born Fake Image True
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET

Hide Language Ourselves Stretch Wrap
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

Achievement Behavior Change Destroy Reflection
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENET

Happiness Herself Kind Slow
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

Discover Memories Music Myself New Silence
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENET

Convict Flower Relationship
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
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENET

Appearance Handsome Men Virtue
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
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
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
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET

Crime Man People Shame True
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
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

Authentic Beauty Himself Man Quit Solitude Source Temporary Wound

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.

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Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.

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