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Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

Jean Genet

On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENET

Body Himself Move
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
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
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
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENET

Calm Disturb Violence Yourself
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.
JEAN GENET

Blessing Evil Place Prison World
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET

Betrayal Experience Happiness Pleasure
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
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENET

Appearance Handsome Men Virtue
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET

Crime Decision Myself
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENET

Cocaine Live Touch
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
Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.
JEAN GENET

Commitment Creation Creature Game Heart Light Run
My heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.
JEAN GENET

Hand Heart Myself Trap
They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
JEAN GENET

Fuse Intimacy Time
I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET

Disappear Lost Myself
Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.
JEAN GENET

Government Mindset Murder
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET

Experience Horny Morning
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
JEAN GENET

Fact Share Strange
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
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET

Bold Dangerous Lying Name Violence
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
JEAN GENET

Act Dreams Man Nurse Order Time
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENET

Hide Language Ourselves Stretch Wrap
Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.
JEAN GENET

Happiness Knowledge Royalty Secret Solitude State Understand Vulnerable
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
JEAN GENET

Achievement Bad Happiness Harmony Taste
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENET

Break Poet Poetry Visible Writing
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENET

Fight Inspirational Mad Past Reason Time

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

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Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

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