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 GENETI recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
More Jean Genet Quotes
-
-
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 could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
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 -
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENET -
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
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 -
On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENET -
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET -
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
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 -
They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
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 -
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENET -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET