Jean Genet Quotes - Page 3

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

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.

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

I don't want to disappear.

on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

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

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

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 . . .

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.

Betrayal is beautiful.

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.

...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.

I decided to be what crime made of me.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

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.

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.

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

The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.

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.