Quote

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

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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
Course
Autobiography
Hurl
Pleasure
Traps
Reviewing
Dark
Cell
Trifle
Moments
Cells
Tracing
May
Failed
Ridden
Life
Fill
Pits
Compartments
Sky
Trifles
Subterranean
Courses
Trap
Strayed

More quotes by Jean Genet

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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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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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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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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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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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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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet
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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet
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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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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
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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.
Jean Genet
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
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Betrayal is beautiful.
Jean Genet
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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.
Jean Genet
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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.
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