Quote

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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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
Secret
Invulnerable
State
Signify
Knowledge
Singularity
Rather
Royalty
Less
Obscure
Understand
Unhappy
Doe
Solitude
States
Profound

More quotes by 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.
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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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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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I don't want to disappear.
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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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Betrayal is beautiful.
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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.
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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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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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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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There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
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Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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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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...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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Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
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