The Thief's Journal Quotes

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

“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

“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

“Betrayal is beautiful.”
― 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

“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

“Saintliness means turning pain to good account. It means forcing the devil to
be God.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“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

“In one of them I am sixteen or seventeen years old. I am wearing, under a jacket of the Assistance Publique, a torn sweater. My face is an oval, very pure; my nose is smashed, flattened by a punch in some forgotten fight. The look on my face is blasé, sad and warm, very serious. My hair was thick and unruly. Seeing myself at that age, I expressed my feelings almost aloud: “Poor little fellow, you've suffered.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“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.”
― 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

“I had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“If I can not have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched, not for the purpose of a sterile solitude, but in order to achieve something new with such rare matter.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Saintliness means turning pain to good account. It means forcing the devil to be God.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Once again I was the center of an intoxicating whirlwind. The French Gestapo contained the following two fascinating elements: treason and theft. With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassailable! It would possess the three virtues which I set up as theological, capable of composing so hard a body as Lucien’s. What could be said against it? It was outside the world. It betrayed (to betray: signifying the breaking of the laws of love). It indulged in pillage. And lastly, it excluded itself from the world by pederasty. It therefore established itself in an unpuncturable solitude.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“In order to understand me, a complicity of the reader will be necessary. Nevertheless, I shall warn him whenever my lyricism makes me lose my footing.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“They are not faithful. Above all, they have a blemish, a wound, comparable to the bunch of grapes in Stilitano’s pants. In short, the greater my guilt in your eyes, the more whole, the more totally assumed, the greater will be my freedom. The more perfect my solitude and singleness.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“FOREWORD Not all who would be are Narcissus. Many who lean over the water see only a vague human figure. Genet sees himself everywhere; the dullest surfaces reflect his image; even in others he perceives himself, thereby bringing to light their deepest secrets. The disturbing theme of the double, the image, the counterpart, the enemy brother, is found in all his works. Each of them has the strange property of being both itself and the reflection of itself. Genet brings before us a dense and teeming throng which intrigues us, transports us and changes into Genet beneath Genet's gaze.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“My love is always sad.”'
“That's right. As soon as I kiss you, you get sad. I've noticed it.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No, it doesn't matter. I'm happy instead of you. I murmur to myself I love you... I love you... I love you...”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“If he lies pressed against me, he gently twines his legs about mine and our legs are merged by the very soft cloth of our pajamas; he then takes great pains to find the right spot to cuddle his cheek. So long as he is not sleeping, I feel the quivering of his eyelids and upturned lashes against the very sensitive skin of my neck. If he feels a tickling in his nostrils, his laziness and drowsiness keep him from lifting his hand, so that in order to scratch himself he rubs his nose against my beard, thus giving me delicate little taps with his head, like a young calf sucking its mother.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Along the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean I went through fishing ports where the elegant poverty of the fishermen wounded my own. Without their seeing me, I would brush against men and women standing in a patch of shade, against boys plying on a square. The love that human beings seem to feel for one another tortured me at the time. If two men exchanged a greeting or a smile in passing, I would retreat to the farthest edges of the world. The glances exchanged by the two friends—and sometimes their words—were the subtlest emanation of a ray of love from the heart of each. A ray of very soft light, delicately coiled: a spun ray of love. I was amazed that such delicacy, so fine a thread and of so precious, and so chaste, a substance as love could be fashioned in so dark a smithy as the muscular bodies of those males, though they themselves always emitted that gentle ray in which there sometimes sparkled the droplets of a mysterious dew. I would fancy hearing the elder say to the other, who was no longer I, speaking of that part of the body which he must have loved dearly: "I'm going to dent your halo for you again tonight!" I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“when at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind’s heaven.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“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.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext−subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. Let it be therefore understood that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“I understand what binds the sculptor to his clay, the painter to his colors, each workman to the matter he handles, and the docility and acquiescence of the matter to the movements of the one who animates it; I know the love that passes from the fingers into the folds, the holes, the swellings. Shall I abandon him? Lucien would prevent me from living. Unless his quiet tenderness, his blushing modesty, became beneath my sun of love a tiger or a lion. If he loves me, will he follow me?

What will become of him without me?”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“I have often burdened myself with things that made my figure and gait look absurd: books under my armpits which prevented my arms from moving, sheets or blankets rolled around my waist which made me seem stout, umbrellas against my legs, medals in a sleeve.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“In short, the greater my guilt in your eyes, the more whole, the more totally assumed, the greater will be my freedom. The more perfect my solitude and uniqueness.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“This association, which tells me things about myself, would not suggest itself to another mind; mine cannot avoid it.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal