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

More quotes by Jean Genet

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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 we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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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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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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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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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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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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
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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.
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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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
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Betrayal is beautiful.
Jean Genet
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet
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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.
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.
Jean Genet
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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
Jean Genet
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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.
Jean Genet