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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.

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’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
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

Dawn Language Morning Name Play Reveal Voice Whisper
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
JEAN GENET

Achievement Bad Happiness Harmony Taste
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
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENET

Born Hate Ideas Need
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
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
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Monster Ornament Projection Purity Ugly
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
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET

Bold Dangerous Lying Name Violence
It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET

Break Day Let Go Myself Night
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
JEAN GENET

Application Ideology Liberty Man Object Revolution
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET

Experience Horny Morning
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET

Hide Language Ourselves Stretch Wrap
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
JEAN GENET

Coincidence Love Rare Worst

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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