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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

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

End Gun Image Power Shadow Weapon
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
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET

Bold Dangerous Lying Name Violence
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

Acknowledgement Artist Moral Murder Save Solitude
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
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENET

Cocaine Live Touch
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
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET

Crime Man People Shame True
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Monster Ornament Projection Purity Ugly
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
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 hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
JEAN GENET

Betrayal Experience Happiness
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 could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
JEAN GENET

Ideas Light Love Myself People
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
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET

Betrayal Experience Happiness Pleasure
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
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
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENET

Happiness Herself Kind Slow
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
JEAN GENET

Justice Man Management Reason Trigger Weapon
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
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

Cruelty Limitation World
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
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET

Experience Horny Morning
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENET

Convict Flower Relationship
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET

Crime Decision Myself
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

Brutal Close Flower Nature Relationship

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.

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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.

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