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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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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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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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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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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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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 vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
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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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Betrayal is beautiful.
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I don't want to disappear.
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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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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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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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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.
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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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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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