Quote

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.

Jean Genet

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Death
Moments
Existentialism
Beautiful
Speed
Stills
Ugly
Still
Oneself
Right
Call
Great
Moment
Life
Living

More quotes by Jean Genet

Image
It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet
Image
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet
Image
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
Jean Genet
Image
Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.
Jean Genet
Image
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Image
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
Jean Genet
Image
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.
Jean Genet
Image
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet
Image
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
Image
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Jean Genet
Image
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
Image
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
Image
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet
Image
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
Jean Genet
Image
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