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
World
Destroy
Reflection
Changing
Instead
Achieve
Side
Sides
Like
Behave

More quotes by Jean Genet

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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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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 pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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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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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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I don't want to disappear.
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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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Betrayal is beautiful.
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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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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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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet
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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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.
Jean Genet
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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