Jean Genet famous quotes

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
-- Jean Genet

#Dream #Would Be #Youth

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
-- Jean Genet

#Dream #Men #Order

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
-- Jean Genet

#Betrayal #Ecstasy

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

#Heart #Hands #Bags

It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
-- Jean Genet

#Night #Hours #Dove

I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
-- Jean Genet

#Eye #Gay #Green

I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
-- Jean Genet

#Ideas #People #Made

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
-- Jean Genet

#Lying #Names #Giving

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

#Body #Littles #End Of The World

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

#Music #Song #Memories

They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.
-- Jean Genet

#Doing Nothing #Intimacy

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
-- Jean Genet

#Ideas #Hatred #Needs

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

#Night #Play #Voice

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

#Men #Solitude #Different

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
-- Jean Genet

#Men #Revolution #Rebellious

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
-- Jean Genet

#Language #Stretching

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
-- Jean Genet

#Art #Point Break #Poetry

Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!
-- Jean Genet

#Blood #Tears #Body

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

#Falling In Love #Kissing #Blood

When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you.
-- Jean Genet

#Hate #Men #Laughing

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

#Giving #World #Shapes

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
-- Jean Genet

#Flower #Close Relationship

The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
-- Jean Genet

#Men #Justice #Triggers

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
-- Jean Genet

#Violence #Calm #Quiet

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 #Ugly #Existentialism

I don't want to disappear.
-- Jean Genet

#Want #Disappear

In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself.
-- Jean Genet

#Grief #Men #Hands

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

#Country #Men #White

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
-- Jean Genet

#Blessed #Evil #Dungeons

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

#Stars #Flower #Order

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
-- Jean Genet

#Dark #Cells #Sky

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
-- Jean Genet

#Body #Adrift #Cocaine

The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
-- Jean Genet

#Fighting #Past #Mad

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

#Men #Imagination #Ease

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

#Mind #Elude #Murder

Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
-- Jean Genet

#Love #Noble #Use

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

#Profound #Solitude #Secret

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
-- Jean Genet

#Morning #Men #Horny

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

#Reflection #World #Want

on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
-- Jean Genet

#Song #Mouths #Body

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
-- Jean Genet

#Saint #Want #Kind

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.
-- Jean Genet

#Imagination #Political #Denial

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
-- Jean Genet

#Facts #Strange #Share

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

#Artist #Solitude #Moral

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

#Thieves #Traitor #Murderer

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

#Success #Congratulations #Hero

...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
-- Jean Genet

#Ornaments #Monstrosity #Certain

First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up. ...
-- Jean Genet

#Rags #Firsts

...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.
-- Jean Genet

#Book #Character #Tone

She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, ***** in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .
-- Jean Genet

#Sweet #Princess #Numbers

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
-- Jean Genet

#Height #Taste #Harmony

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

#Real #Men #People

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
-- Jean Genet

#Suicide #Suicidal #Fascination

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.
-- Jean Genet

#Mean #House #Streets

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
-- Jean Genet

#Pimp

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

#Cheating #Adventure #Games

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

#Flower #Delicacy #Fragility

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
-- Jean Genet

#Men #Evil #May

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

#Men #Spy #Lenses

I decided to be what crime made of me,
-- Jean Genet

#Crime #Made

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

#Men #Opposites #Names

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

#Air #Evil #Criminals

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

#Gun #Power #Shadow

Betrayal is beautiful.
-- Jean Genet

#Beautiful #Betrayal

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
-- Jean Genet

#Born

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
-- Jean Genet

#Ghetto #Wind #People