Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet19 December 1910 – 15 April 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 December 1910
CountryFrance
dream would-be youth
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
dream men order
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
fighting past mad
The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
betrayal betrayed ecstasy
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
night hours dove
It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
music song memories
Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
doing-nothing intimacy fuse
They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.
balls world mouths
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.
night play voice
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.
cheating adventure games
We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent - or they themselves - was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible.
profound solitude secret
Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.
facts strange share
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
ornaments monstrosity certain
...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
hate men laughing
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.