Top 93 Jean Genet Quotes
#1. Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!
Jean Genet
#2. The severe and at times almost condemning glance - a glance that seems to pass judgment - with which the homosexual appraises every good-looking young man he may encounter, is in reality a quick but intense meditation on his own loneliness
Jean Genet
#3. Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
Jean Genet
#4. Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Jean Genet
#5. By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
Jean Genet
#6. 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.
Jean Genet
#7. The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
Jean Genet
#8. 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 ...
Jean Genet
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls, for a customer murmured a magic word: 'homoseckshual
Jean Genet
#12. Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.
Jean Genet
#13. When I got to the street, I walked boldly. But I was always accompanied by an agonizing thought: the fear that honest people may be thieves who have chosen a cleverer and safer way of stealing.
Jean Genet
#14. 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.
Jean Genet
#15. I decided to be what crime made of me,
Jean Genet
#16. Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
Jean Genet
#17. Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.
Jean Genet
#18. Anyone who has not experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet
#19. Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
Jean Genet
#20. We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
Jean Genet
#21. On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Jean Genet
#22. Would it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?
Jean Genet
#23. For I do not love the oppressed. I love those whom I love, who are always handsome and sometimes oppressed but stand up and rebel
Jean Genet
#24. Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
Jean Genet
#25. 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
#26. Ariadne in the labyrinth. The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation as I pass. I wander dead-eyed through cities and petrified populations.
Jean Genet
#27. A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
#28. I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet
#29. She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings ...
Jean Genet
#30. Those eyes, seemingly without mystery, are like certain closed cities, such as Lyons and Zurich, and they hypnotize me as do empty theaters, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts, for deserts are closed and do not communicate with the infinite.
Jean Genet
#31. He did not joke, as the newspapers dared report, for sarcasm is bitter and conceals ferments of despair.
Jean Genet
#32. Faggots are the great immoralists.
Jean Genet
#33. Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
Jean Genet
#34. Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Jean Genet
#35. Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet
#36. The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
Jean Genet
#37. Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
Jean Genet
#38. I'm homosexual ... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
Jean Genet
#39. 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
#40. They spent their time doing nothing ... they let intimacy fuse them.
Jean Genet
#41. There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.
Jean Genet
#42. 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
#43. He already had one foot in the winter of heaven. He was going to be whisked up.
Jean Genet
#44. Divine departed as she would have desired, in a mixture of fantasy and sordidness.
Jean Genet
#45. It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
#46. Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet
#47. By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people cease to regard me.
Jean Genet
#48. Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
Jean Genet
#49. I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
Jean Genet
#50. When I wrote to him, I wanted my letters to be sprightly, trivial, indifferent. In spite of myself, I imbued them with my love. I would have liked to make it seem powerful, sure of itself and sure of me, but I infused it, despite myself, with all my anxiety.
Jean Genet
#52. My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.
Jean Genet
#53. The door made the usual, terrifying sound of a door.
Jean Genet
#54. There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
Jean Genet
#55. 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
#56. Thereafter, he ennobled shame. He bore it in my presence like a burden, like a tiger clinging to his shoulders, the threat of which imparted to his shoulders a most insolent submissiveness.
Jean Genet
#57. The Archangel took his role of fucker seriously. It made him sing the Marseillaise, for now he was proud of being a Frenchman and a Gallic cock, of which only males are proud. Then he died in the war.
Jean Genet
#58. 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.
Jean Genet
#59. To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.
Jean Genet
#60. The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
Jean Genet
#61. 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.
Jean Genet
#62. To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Jean Genet
#63. It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
Jean Genet
#64. 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.
Jean Genet
#65. [Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us struggle and you're envious.
Jean Genet
#66. 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
#67. 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.
Jean Genet
#68. Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.
Jean Genet
#69. 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.
Jean Genet
#70. You must now go home, where everything
you can be quite sure
will be falser than here ... You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley ...
Jean Genet
#71. What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
Jean Genet
#72. The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
Jean Genet
#73. They made comments about the women's legs, but, as they were not witty, their remarks had no finesse. Since their emotion was not torn by any point, they quite naturally skidded along on a stagnent ground of poetry.
Jean Genet
#74. One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what's going on in this house.
Jean Genet
#75. If I have viewed them from a certain angle, it is because, seen from there, that is how they looked
which may be due to prismatic distortion, but which is therefore what they also are, though unaware of being it.
Jean Genet
#77. She went to get the revolver, which had long since been loaded by a most considerate Providence, and when she held it in her hand, weighty as a phallus in action, she realised she was big with murder, pregnant with a corpse.
Jean Genet
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
Jean Genet
#81. The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
Jean Genet
#82. The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man ... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet
#84. Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency.
Jean Genet
#85. 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
Jean Genet
#86. Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly.
Jean Genet
#87. But," she said to the priest, "I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling.
Jean Genet
#88. I, his mistress, mad with grief, shall follow him ... I shall share his glory. You speak of widowhood and deny me the white gown - the mourning of queens.
Jean Genet
#89. 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
#90. Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
Jean Genet
#91. 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
#92. I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.
Jean Genet
#93. I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
Jean Genet
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