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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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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
Visible
Meetings
Invisible
Poetry
Break
Point
Rather
Breaking
Art
Meeting

More quotes by 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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It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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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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I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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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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Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
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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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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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.
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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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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.
Jean Genet
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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.
Jean Genet
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The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
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.
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.
Jean Genet
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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.
Jean Genet
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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet