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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.

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
Like
Suddenly
Lenses
Shipwrecked
Saved
Sail
Despondency
Seen
Somewhat
Blurred
Makes
Follows
Spies
Remember
Spot
Flaw
Feel
Flaws
Spy
Feels
Spots
Remembers
Men
Sees
Lens

More quotes by Jean Genet

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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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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
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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet
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Betrayal is beautiful.
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?
Jean Genet
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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
Jean Genet
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
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I don't want to disappear.
Jean Genet
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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet
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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
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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.
Jean Genet
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
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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
Jean Genet