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

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
Men
People
Constitute
Crimes
Ashamed
Crime
History
True
Real

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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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...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.
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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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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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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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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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
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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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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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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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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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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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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
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