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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.

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
Friendly
Displayed
Death
Invisible
Weep
Order
Grief
Chamber
Hands
Bird
Advanced
Men
Fields
Realm
Stairways
Dead
Realms
Chambers
Secret
Soft
Folded
Birds
Descended
Within

More quotes by Jean Genet

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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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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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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 pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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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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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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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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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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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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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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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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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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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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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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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