By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENETThe 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.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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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.
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There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
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Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
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Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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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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Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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 -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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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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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 -
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.
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The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
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 -
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENET