Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Agree
Hopelessly
Air
Wickedness
Virtue
Forbidden
Evil
Organize
Universe
Hopeless
Live
Virtues
World
Criminals
Breathe
Nauseating

More quotes by Jean Genet

Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet
Image
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
Jean Genet
Image
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Jean Genet
Image
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Jean Genet
Image
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
Jean Genet
Image
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Image
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent - or they themselves - was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible.
Jean Genet