Our Lady of the Flowers Quotes

“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

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

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

“Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“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

“on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Ariadne in the labyrinth. The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation as I pass. I wander dead-eyed through cities and petrified populations.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Those eyes, seemingly without mystery, are like certain closed cities, such as Lyons and Zurich, and they hypnotize me as do empty theaters, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts, for deserts are closed and do not communicate with the infinite.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“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

“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

“I have already spoken of my fondness for odors, the strong odors of the earth, of latrines, of the loins of Arabs and, above all, the odor of my farts, which is not the odor of my shit, a loathsome odor, so much so that here again I bury myself beneath the covers and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck in. I feel them, almost solid, going down through my nostrils. But only the odor of my own farts delights me, and those of the handsomest boy repel me. Even the faintest doubt as to whether an odor comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“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

“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

“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth inordinately and turning it around 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 my way of seeing the end of the world.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“I let myself drift, as to the depth of an ocean, to the depths of a dismal neighborhood of had and opaque but rather light houses, to the inner gaze of memory, for the matter of memory is porous”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“But," she said to the priest, "I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Faggots are the great immoralists.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls, for a customer murmured a magic word: 'homoseckshual”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Since Divine is dead, the poet may sing her, may tell her legend, the Saga, the annals of Divine. The Divine Saga should be danced, mimed, with subtle directions. Since it is impossible to make a ballet of it, I am forced to use words that are weighed down with precise ideas, but I shall try to lighten them with expressions that are empty, hollow and invisible.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“In her garret, Divine lived only on tea and grief.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“It was a good thing that I raised egoistic masturbation to the dignity of a cult! I have only to begin the gesture and a kind of unclean and supernatural transposition displaces the truth. Everything within me turns worshipper. The external vision of the props of my desire isolates me, far from the world.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“The solid citizens going by, who make up the crowd, see nothing, know nothing. They are scarcely, imperceptibly, dislodged from their calm state of confidence by the trivial event: Divine being led away by the arm, and her sisters who bewail her.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Slowly but surely I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“In space, she kept devising new and barbaric forms for herself, for she sensed intuitively that immobility makes it too easy for God to get you in a good wrestling hold and carry you off. So she danced. While walking. Everywhere.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Exiled among the living, I have made myself a soul to fit my dwelling.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“It was a simple matter to choose a physique for him, for she possessed in her secret, lonely-girl's imagination, for her nights’ pleasure, a stock of thighs, arms, torsoes, faces, hair, teeth, necks, and knees, and she knew how to assemble them so as to make of them a live man to whom she loaned a soul–which was always the same one for each of these constructions: the one she would have liked to have herself.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“I would like to kill. As I have said above, rather than an old man, I would like to kill a handsome blond boy, so that, already united by the verbal link that joins the murderer and the murdered (each existing thanks to the other), I may be visited, during days and nights of hopeless melancholy, by a handsome ghost of which I would be the haunted castle.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“The dead man is rigorous. Your dead man is inside you; mingled with your blood, he flows in your veins, oozes out through your pores, and your heart lives on him, as cemetery flowers sprout from corpses. . . . He emerges from you through your eyes, your ears, your mouth.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“The sob at my eyes might have flowed into tears, but it remains there, weighing against my eyelids like a condemned man against the door of a cell.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers