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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.

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

Achievement Behavior Change Destroy Reflection
The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENET

Fight Inspirational Mad Past Reason Time
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
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

Discover Memories Music Myself New Silence
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
JEAN GENET

Fame Hero Pay Success
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENET

Break Poet Poetry Visible Writing
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENET

Calm Disturb Violence Yourself
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
JEAN GENET

Application Ideology Liberty Man Object Revolution
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENET

Appearance Handsome Men Virtue
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
It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET

Break Day Let Go Myself Night
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
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
JEAN GENET

Dreams Realize Regret Worst Young Yourself Youth
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET

Betrayal Experience Happiness Pleasure
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
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

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.

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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.

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Popular Authors

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