Quote

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

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
Name
Names
Lying
Give
Enamored
Giving
Boldness
Idle
Danger
Violence

More quotes by Jean Genet

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When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
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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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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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...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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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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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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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 pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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Betrayal is beautiful.
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First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.
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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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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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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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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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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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