Quotes from Jean Genet

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all

Divine departed as she would have desired, in a mixture of fantasy and sordidness.

Dünya, y?k?m?m? istiyorsa, baÅŸar?ma dikkat eder.Bir yanl??l??? pahal? öderim, ama bunu zaman?nda yakalarsam, bana öyle geliyor ki, cennette bile göbek at?lacakt?r.

Nasze ?ycie rodzinne,prawo naszych domów,nie przypomina ani trochÄ™ waszych domów.Kochamy siÄ™,ale jest to miÅ'o?? bez miÅ'oÅ›ci

?wi?to?? to smutek

Dzi?ki temu,?e powiedzia? mi,i? nie ?yj?,pogodzi?em si? z faktem,?e ludzie wyrzucili mnie ze swoich my?li

when Divine seeks out the lost Alberto, she tries to portray him on herself and invents his smile with her own mouth. She puckers her muscles in what she thinks is the right way, the way–so she thinks when she feels her mouth twisting–that makes her resemble Alberto, until the day it occurs to her to do it in front of a mirror, and she realizes that her grimaces in no way resemble the smile we have already called starlike.)

Je hasarde une explication : écrire c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi.

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.

J'étais de toute éternité et je suis né afin de pouvoir enfin m'anéantir.

Certain attacks brought him so close to death that I wonder how he escaped it, what imperceptible shock—coming from whom?—pushed him back from the brink.

If man is, or is searching to be, omnipotent, I am willing to accept Chicago's gigantism; but I should like the opposite to be accepted as well: a city which would fit in the hollow of one's hand.

It was therefore natural for me to imagine what his penis would be if he smeared it for my benefit with so fine a substance, with that precious cobweb, a tissue which I secretly called the veil of the palace.

Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls, for a customer murmured a magic word: 'homoseckshual

Novels are not humanitarian reports. Indeed, let us be thankful that there remains sufficient cruelty, without which beauty would not be.

En prison on ferme plus de portes qu'on n'en ouvre.

si vous voulez bien convenir que la poésie est la rupture (ou plutôt la rencontre au point de rupture) du visible et de l'invisible

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.

The severe and at times almost condemning glance - a glance that seems to pass judgment - with which the homosexual appraises every good-looking young man he may encounter, is in reality a quick but intense meditation on his own loneliness

In her garret, Divine lived only on tea and grief.

I let myself drift, as to the depth of an ocean, to the depths of a dismal neighborhood of hard and opaque but rather light houses, to the inner gaze of memory, for the matter of memory is porous.

one must love the Circus and despise the world.

Divine departed as she would have desired, in a mixture of fantasy and sordidness. Divine is dead, is dead and buried . . . . . . is dead and buried.

She went to get the revolver, which had long since been loaded by a most considerate Providence, and when she held it in her hand, weighty as a phallus in action, she realised she was big with murder, pregnant with a corpse.