"Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?"
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Quote collection
Jean Genet quotes (page 2 of 4)
69 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts."
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"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."
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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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"Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity."
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"By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide."
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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 leave you free to imagine any dialogue you please. Choose whatever may charm you. Have it, if you like, that they hear the voice of the blood, or that they fall in love at first sight... Conceive the wildest improbabilities. Have it that the depths of their beings are thrilled at accosting each other in slang. Tangle them suddenly in a swift embrace or a brotherly kiss. Do whatever you like."
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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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"Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible."
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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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"They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them."
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"What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born."
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"Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run."
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"They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead."
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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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"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile."
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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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"Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is."
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