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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

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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
Young
Never
Would
Dreamed
Worse
Youth
Dreams
Realizing
Dream

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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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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
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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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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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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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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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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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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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Betrayal is beautiful.
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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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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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