Jean Genet Quotes
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Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
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In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky
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The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
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I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
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Betrayal is beautiful.
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I decided to be what crime made of me.
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They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination.
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The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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.
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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.
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One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what's going on in this house.
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She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .
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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.
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It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!
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To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
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Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
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