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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
Crimes
Ashamed
Crime
History
True
Real
Men
People
Constitute

More quotes by Jean Genet

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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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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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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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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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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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I don't want to disappear.
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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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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Betrayal is beautiful.
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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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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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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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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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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Jean Genet
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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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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet