Jean Genet Quotes

Jean Genet presents dramatic, provocative musings that feel like daring theatrical monologues.

39 quotes

1. ''This violence is a calm that disturbs you.''

2. ''But I would adore that thief who is my mother.''

3. ''If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!''

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

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

6. Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.''

7. ''To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.''

8. ''Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?''

9. ''But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.''

10. ''With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.'' [In reference to the French Gestapo]

11. ''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.''

12. ''So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.''

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

14. I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

15. Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

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

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

18. 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.

19. 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.

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

21. 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.

22. 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.

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

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

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

26. I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.

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

28. 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.

29. Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.

30. 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.

31. It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.

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

33. The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

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

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

38. 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.

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.