Quote

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

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Jean Genet
Age: 75 †
Born: 1910
Born: December 19
Died: 1986
Died: April 15
Author
Film Director
Film Editor
Military Personnel
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Paris
France
Four
Centuries
Invisibility
Away
Friendly
Humiliated
Littles
Gentle
Swept
Little
Shame
Ghetto
Great
Saws
Dropped
People
Wind
Humiliation
Century
Breeze
Almost
Carrying

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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.
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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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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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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.
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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.
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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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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.
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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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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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I don't want to disappear.
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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.
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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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.
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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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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.
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