It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENETWhat 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.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET -
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET -
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET -
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
JEAN GENET -
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENET -
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENET