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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.

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
Ruthless
Murderer
Cunning
Thieves
Recognize
Sunken
Deep
Traitors
Beauty
Murderers
Traitor

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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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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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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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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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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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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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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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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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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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...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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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 vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
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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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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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