Jean Genet Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Jean Genet Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.— Jean Genet
If I have viewed them from a certain angle, it is because, seen from there, that is how they looked— Jean Genet
which may be due to prismatic distortion, but which is therefore what they also are, though unaware of being it.
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
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.— Jean Genet
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.— Jean Genet
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.— Jean Genet
Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity.— Jean Genet
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
My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.— Jean Genet
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.— Jean Genet
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.— Jean Genet
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
Then, upon turning their heads,they realised that they had unwittingly been following a succession of winding paths more complicated than those of a mine. There was no end to Harcamone's interior. It was more decked with black than capital whose king has just been assassinated. A voice from the heart declared: "The interior is grieving," and they swelled with fear, which rose within them like a light wind above the sea.— Jean Genet
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.— Jean Genet
It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.— Jean Genet
Betrayal is beautiful.— Jean Genet
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man ... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.— Jean Genet
In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty.— Jean Genet
I don't want to disappear.— Jean Genet
I love you because you're tender and sweet, you the hardest and sternest of men. And your sweetness and tenderness are such that they make you as light as a shred of tulle, subtle as a flake of mist, airy as a caprice. Your thick muscles, your arms, your thighs, your hands, are more unreal than the melting of day into night. You envelop me and I contain you.— Jean Genet
He already had one foot in the winter of heaven. He was going to be whisked up.— Jean Genet
When the name was in the room, it came to pass that the murderer, abashed, opened up, and there sprang forth, like a Glory, from his pitiable fragments, an altar on which there lay, in the roses, a woman of light and flesh.— Jean Genet
The alter undulated on a foul mud into which it sank: the murderer.
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
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.— Jean Genet
Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls, for a customer murmured a magic word: 'homoseckshual— Jean Genet
He did not joke, as the newspapers dared report, for sarcasm is bitter and conceals ferments of despair.— Jean Genet
I am his tomb. The earth is nothing. Dead. Staves and orchards issue from my mouth. His. Perfume my chest, which is wide, wide open. A greengage plum swells his silence. The bees escape from his eyes, from his sockets where the liquid pupils have flowed from under the flaccid eyelids. To eat a youngster shot on the barricades, to devour a young hero, is no easy thing. We all love the sun. My mouth is bloody. So are my fingers. I tore the flesh to shreds with my teeth. Corpses do not usually bleed. His did.— Jean Genet
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.— Jean Genet
By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people cease to regard me.— Jean Genet
Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast, scavenging for the scraps that may perchance plummet off humanity's dirty plates, though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant is more convenient.— Patti Smith
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
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
It was around this time that I'd begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people's minds. I'd figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn't know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I'd talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I'd talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I'd talk about Roy Lichtenstein; if he knew a lot about pop art, I'd talk about Jean Genet; and so on. Do that in a small provincial city and you never lose an argument.— Ryu Murakami
Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly.— Jean Genet
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
Faggots are the great immoralists.— Jean Genet
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.— Jean Genet
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.— Jean Genet
They spent their time doing nothing ... they let intimacy fuse them.— Jean Genet
But I shall transmit their names far down the ages. These names alone will remain in the future, divested of their objects. Who, it will be asked, were Bulkaen, Harcamone, Divers, who was Pilorge, who was Guy? And their names will inspire awe, as we are awed by the light from a star that has been dead a thousand years. Have I told all there was to tell of this adventure? If I take leave of this book, I take leave of what can be related. The rest is ineffable. I say no more and walk barefoot.— Jean Genet
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
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.— Jean Genet
Divine departed as she would have desired, in a mixture of fantasy and sordidness.— Jean Genet
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.— Jean Genet
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.— Jean Genet
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
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
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.— Jean Genet
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
But," she said to the priest, "I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling.— Jean Genet
Anyone who has not experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.— Jean Genet
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
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
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.— Jean Genet
The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.— Jean Genet
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
Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.— Jean Genet
I was in the habit of calling a kiss a peck. Bulkaen had said "a smack." As erotic language, such as we use in dalliance, is a kind of secretion, a concentrated juice that flows from the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of plaint, as this language is, in other words, the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, a language which has a perfume, an odor sui generis which belongs only to that couple ... intimacy ... the secret rites of a deep love.— Jean Genet
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
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.— Jean Genet
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
I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.— David Bowie
The door made the usual, terrifying sound of a door.— Jean Genet
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.— Jean Genet
It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.— Jean Genet
A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded.— Jean Genet
The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can't be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day ... The hour in which ... every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.— Jean Genet
I decided to be what crime made of me,— Jean Genet
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
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
Hell has degrees, so does love— Jean Genet
You must now go home, where everything— Jean Genet
you can be quite sure
will be falser than here ... You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley ...
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.— Jean Genet
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
When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by experimenting, making mistakes, sketching out freaks and other non-viable monsters that he has to tear up unless they disintegrate of their own accord. But the operative image is the one that's left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future. It doesn't matter whether or not the image corresponds to what they were really like: they managed to wrest a powerful image from that reality.— Jean Genet
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
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
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
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
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
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.— Jean Genet
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
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
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.— Jean Genet
The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. 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. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they draw their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them.— Jean Genet
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
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?— Jean Genet
[Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us struggle and you're envious.— Jean Genet
![Jean Genet Sayings By Jean Genet: [Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/jean-genet-sayings-by-jean-genet-1800950.jpg "Jean Genet Sayings By Jean Genet: [Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us")
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.— Jean Genet
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.— Jean Genet
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
The coldness surprised him. It entered his vein, and the initiation proceeded. Veils were falling from large and solemn tableaux that Culafroy's eyes could not make out. Alberto took another snake and placed it on Culafroy's bare arm, about which it coiled just as the first had done. "You see, she's harmless." (Alberto always referred to snakes in the feminine.) Just as he felt his penis swelling between his fingers, so the sensitive Alberto felt in the child the mounting emotion that stiffened him and made him shudder. And the insidious friendship for snakes was born.— Jean Genet
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
