Quotes from Jean Genet

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.

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.

I had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature.

But," she said to the priest, "I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling.

Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but profound solitude.

If I have viewed them from a certain angle, it is because, seen from there, that is how they looked--which may be due to prismatic distortion, but which is therefore what they also are, though unaware of being it.

But I shall transmit their names far down the ages. These names alone will remain in the future, divested of their objects. Who, it will be asked, were Bulkaen, Harcamone, Divers, who was Pilorge, who was Guy? And their names will inspire awe, as we are awed by the light from a star that has been dead a thousand years. Have I told all there was to tell of this adventure? If I take leave of this book, I take leave of what can be related. The rest is ineffable. I say no more and walk barefoot.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

Then, upon turning their heads,they realised that they had unwittingly been following a succession of winding paths more complicated than those of a mine. There was no end to Harcamone's interior. It was more decked with black than capital whose king has just been assassinated. A voice from the heart declared: "The interior is grieving," and they swelled with fear, which rose within them like a light wind above the sea.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

I love you as if you were in my belly. You're not my sweetheart, you're myself. My heart or my sex. A branch of me.

Slowly but surely I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her

For I do not love the oppressed. I love those whom I love, who are always handsome and sometimes oppressed but stand up and rebel

I, his mistress, mad with grief, shall follow him...I shall share his glory. You speak of widowhood and deny me the white gown - the mourning of queens.

Humility can only be born out of humiliation

And he was apprehensive that some light, emanating from within his body, or from his true consciousness, might not be illuminating him, might not, in some way from inside the scaly carapace, give off a reflection of that true form and make him visible to men, who would then have to hunt him down.

Faggots are the great immoralists.

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