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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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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
Criminals
Breathe
Nauseating
Agree
Hopelessly
Air
Wickedness
Virtue
Forbidden
Evil
Organize
Universe
Hopeless
Live
Virtues
More quotes by Jean Genet
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.
Jean Genet
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet
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.
Jean Genet
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
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.
Jean Genet
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet
I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
Jean Genet
...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
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
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
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
Jean Genet
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Jean Genet
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
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
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.
Jean Genet
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
Jean Genet
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
It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet
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
