"Violence is a calm that disturbs you."
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Jean Genet quotes (page 3 of 4)
69 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"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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"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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"I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger."
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"It's a true image, born of a false spectacle."
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"The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them."
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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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"...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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"The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination."
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"The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable."
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"Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues."
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"When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you."
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"Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil."
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"The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice."
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"I don't want to disappear."
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"I decided to be what crime made of me."
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"Betrayal is beautiful."
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"I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me."
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