Jean Genet was a French writer, poet, and political activist who was born in 1910. He was best known for his novels, plays, and poetry, which often dealt with themes of homosexuality, criminality, and social marginalization. His most famous works include The Balcony, The Maids, and The Screens.
What is the most famous quote by Jean Genet ?
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
— Jean Genet
What can you learn from Jean Genet (Life Lessons)
- Jean Genet taught us to embrace our own individualism, no matter how unconventional it may be. He showed us that we should be unafraid to express ourselves and to take risks in order to pursue our passions.
- He also emphasized the importance of understanding and compassion for those who are different from us, and that we should strive to find common ground in order to create a more harmonious society.
- Lastly, Genet taught us that we must always strive to be true to ourselves and our beliefs, no matter the cost.
The most exciting Jean Genet quotes that are free to learn and impress others
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Jean Genet inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Jean Genet.
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.
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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 . . .
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.
I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
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.
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.
Provocative quotes by Jean Genet
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man.
.. not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
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.
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.
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
Quotations by Jean Genet that are surreal and subversive
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.
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
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.
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.
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.
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.
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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.
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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.
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
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.
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!
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.
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.
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
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.
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.
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
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.
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.
Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.
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.