Authors
Jean Genet Quotes
Best Quotes by Jean Genet (Top 10)
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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet -
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet -
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Jean Genet -
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 -
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet -
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
Jean Genet -
I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.
Jean Genet -
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 -
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 -
It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
Jean Genet
More Jean Genet Quotes
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Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!
Jean Genet -
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet -
I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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 -
I leave you free to imagine any dialogue you please. Choose whatever may charm you. Have it, if you like, that they hear the voice of the blood, or that they fall in love at first sight... Conceive the wildest improbabilities. Have it that the depths of their beings are thrilled at accosting each other in slang. Tangle them suddenly in a swift embrace or a brotherly kiss. Do whatever you like.
Jean Genet -
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 -
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet -
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Jean Genet -
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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 -
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.
Jean Genet -
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 -
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
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 -
We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent - or they themselves - was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible.
Jean Genet -
When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men.
Jean Genet -
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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