Quote

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.

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
Sides
Like
Behave
World
Destroy
Reflection
Changing
Instead
Achieve
Side

More quotes by Jean Genet

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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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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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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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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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...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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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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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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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.
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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy 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.
Jean Genet
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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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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
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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.
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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.
Jean Genet
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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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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
Jean Genet