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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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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
Wonder
Hanging
Race
Plants
American
Branches
White
Racism
Black
Plant
Doesn
Hatred
Country
Deep
Negroes
Every
Tree
Intensely

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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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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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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
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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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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
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Betrayal is beautiful.
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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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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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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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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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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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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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