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 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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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET -
I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET -
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET -
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENET -
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
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 -
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET -
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENET -
It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET -
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENET -
Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
JEAN GENET