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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

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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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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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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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?
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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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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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...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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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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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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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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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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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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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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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 give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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