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

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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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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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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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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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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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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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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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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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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.
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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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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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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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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Betrayal is beautiful.
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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