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

More quotes by Jean Genet

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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
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Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.
Jean Genet
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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.
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.
Jean Genet
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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.
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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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
Jean Genet
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...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.
Jean Genet
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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet
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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet
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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
Jean Genet
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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.
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.
Jean Genet
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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet
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Betrayal is beautiful.
Jean Genet
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Jean Genet
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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.
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