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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.

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
Tragedy
Opponent
Adventure
Card
Kill
Fools
Fool
Opponents
Delinquency
Game
Cards
Tragedies
Ready
Killed
Childish
Possible
Thanks
Adventures
Games
Fellows
Cheating

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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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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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 pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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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
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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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I don't want to disappear.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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