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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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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
Imagination
Endowed
Values
Denying
Upon
Addition
Universe
Sovereign
May
Poetic
Great
Faculty
Men
Ease
Wild

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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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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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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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Betrayal is beautiful.
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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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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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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
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I don't want to disappear.
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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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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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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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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 give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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