Quote

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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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
Different
Visible
Wound
Every
Wounds
Origin
Would
Solitude
Authentic
Men
Bears
Preserves
World
Case
Quit
Cases
Temporary
Beauty
Quitting
Withdraws
Within
Hidden
Singular

More quotes by Jean Genet

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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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.
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Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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I don't want to disappear.
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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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Betrayal is beautiful.
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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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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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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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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 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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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
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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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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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