Quote

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

Jean Genet

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Jean Genet

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
Image
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet
Image
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
Jean Genet
Image
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Image
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
Image
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet
Image
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
Jean Genet
Image
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Jean Genet
Image
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet