Jean Genet Quotes

64 quotes in 962 categories

• The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
• I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
• 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…
• 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…
• Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
• What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
• 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…
• 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…
• Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
• 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…
• I decided to be what crime made of me,
• 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…
• I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
• 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…
• Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
• The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

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