Jean Genet > Quotes

“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 . . . ”
― Jean Genet, Querelle

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

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“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, Our Lady of the Flowers

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

“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.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!”
― Jean Genet, Querelle

“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.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.”
― Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose

“The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. 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. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they draw their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them.”
― Jean Genet, Querelle

“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. ...”
― Jean Genet

“They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love

“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.”
― Jean Genet

“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.”
― Jean Genet

“Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.”
― Jean Genet, Querelle

“...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.”
― Jean Genet, Funeral Rites

“He already had one foot in the winter of heaven. He was going to be whisked up.”
― Jean Genet, Miracle de La Rose

“إن العالم العربي، الذي ترونه من باريس، لم يبق منذ عهد محمد علي في مصر محنيا ولا جامدا. لقد انتفض محمد علي ضد الامبراطورية العثمانية والانجليز، تلته انتفاضة دروز سوريا في 1925، التي سحقها جنرالكم غورو، فحرب الجزائر، فالأنتفاضة المغربية وانتفاضة التونسيين التي أجلت كلأ من الفرنسيين والطليان الذين كانوا يتقاسمون خارطة الأمطار الشهيرة، فنهوض الجنرال قاسم بوجه الإنجليز في وشركة نفط العراق في 1958، ولم يدع عبد الناصر ولا حتى القذافي المملكة السنوسية سالمة. إن عالمنا كله انتفض ليتخلص من قمله، لكن لا رحب ولا فعل كان لهما مدى الثورة الفلسطينية”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love

“They made comments about the women's legs, but, as they were not witty, their remarks had no finesse. Since their emotion was not torn by any point, they quite naturally skidded along on a stagnent ground of poetry.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“When I got to the street, I walked boldly. But I was always accompanied by an agonizing thought: the fear that honest people may be thieves who have chosen a cleverer and safer way of stealing.”
― Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose

“It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Betrayal is beautiful.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Thereafter, he ennobled shame. He bore it in my presence like a burden, like a tiger clinging to his shoulders, the threat of which imparted to his shoulders a most insolent submissiveness.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“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.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“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 Balcony

“The pimp has a grin, never a smile.”
― Jean Genet, The Balcony

“When the name was in the room, it came to pass that the murderer, abashed, opened up, and there sprang forth, like a Glory, from his pitiable fragments, an altar on which there lay, in the roses, a woman of light and flesh.

The alter undulated on a foul mud into which it sank: the murderer.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.”
― Jean Genet, The Balcony

“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....”
― Jean Genet, The Balcony

“I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty. ”
― Jean Genet

“لا شك أن جاذبية مفرطة تحيل النساء الحسنوات، الرقيقات مثلا، عصيات على الاحتمال، والرجال، إذ يقفون على مبعدة منهن،يتلقون منهن بين الفينة والأخرى بعض البوارق، ويتحملون هذه الجاذبية زمنا أطول، ولكن عملهن بمرأى منا – قيامهن بشحذ مفاتنهن الإغرائية- يحولنا الى خادمة موليير تلك، التي يروى أن الشاعر كان يجرب عليها الرقية الخبيثة لملهاواته الجديدة. كانت تعرف أم اللقايا ستكون رائعة لأنها موجهة الى جمهور غائب سيكون تحت الأنوار، مبهرجا بالمباذل والبرانس، في حين تظل هي خادمة تحمل صدريات لإزالة مكياج المعلم. كان يلزمه استحمام وتهيئة.”
― Jean Genet

“Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“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.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“The Archangel took his role of fucker seriously. It made him sing the Marseillaise, for now he was proud of being a Frenchman and a Gallic cock, of which only males are proud. Then he died in the war.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“[Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us struggle and you're envious.”
― Jean Genet, The Maids & Deathwatch

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