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

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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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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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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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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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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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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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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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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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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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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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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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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.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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