It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENETThe main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
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They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
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 -
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 -
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
JEAN GENET -
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENET -
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
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 -
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?
JEAN GENET -
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
JEAN GENET -
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENET -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET -
By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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 -
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 -
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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 -
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 -
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET -
Betrayal is beautiful.
JEAN GENET -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET -
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
JEAN GENET -
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET -
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.
JEAN GENET