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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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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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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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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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.
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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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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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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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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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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Betrayal is beautiful.
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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.
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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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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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