Jean Genet Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.

Jean Genet
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

Jean Genet
With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.

Jean Genet
Criminals and police are the most virile emanation of this world.

Jean Genet
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.

Jean Genet
Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.

Jean Genet
I call saintliness not a state but the moral procedure leading to it.

Jean Genet
It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

Jean Genet
I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.

Jean Genet
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

Jean Genet
If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!

Jean Genet
The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side.

Jean Genet
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

Jean Genet
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.

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 about ecstasy at all.

Jean Genet
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Jean Genet
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

Jean Genet
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

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
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

Jean Genet
I recognize in thieves, traitors, and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty—a sunken beauty.

Jean Genet
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

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
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
By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.

Jean Genet
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
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

Jean Genet
I was already refusing to have taste. I forbade myself to have it. I knew that the cultivation of it would have not refined me but softened me.

Jean Genet
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.

Jean Genet