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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Jean Genet

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
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENET

Bold Dangerous Lying Name Violence
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

Beautiful Death Life Moments See
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET

Crime Decision Myself
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

Feeling Flaw Follow Himself Man Remember Save
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
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Monster Ornament Projection Purity Ugly
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
JEAN GENET

Coincidence Love Rare Worst
I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET

Disappear Lost Myself
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
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENET

Cocaine Live Touch
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENET

Born Hate Ideas Need
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
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
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
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENET

Beautiful Myself Recognition Thief
Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
JEAN GENET

Betrayal Experience Happiness Pleasure
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
It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET

Break Day Let Go Myself Night
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
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENET

Experience Horny Morning
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
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
They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
JEAN GENET

Fuse Intimacy Time
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
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
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENET

Born Fake Image True

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

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Popular Authors

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