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

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

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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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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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I don't want to disappear.
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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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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 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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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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