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By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

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
Distort
Wrap
Sufficiently
Wraps
Stretching
Hide
Language

More quotes by 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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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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When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy 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.
Jean Genet
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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.
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.
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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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The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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?
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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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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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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I don't want to disappear.
Jean Genet
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I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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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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.
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