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

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

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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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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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