Jean Genet

Dramatist

1910-12-19

Quotes by Jean Genet

• You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley....

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

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• 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.

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• I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it 
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty 
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
 beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the 
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
 glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

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

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• To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

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• 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.

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

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• You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley....

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• To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

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

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• I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it 
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty 
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
 beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the 
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
 glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

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• 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.

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

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

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

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

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• 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

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

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

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