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Quotes by Jean Genet

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
– Jean Genet
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
– Jean Genet
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
– Jean Genet
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
– Jean Genet
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
– Jean Genet
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty-a sunken beauty.
– Jean Genet
I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
– Jean Genet
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.
– Jean Genet
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
– Jean Genet
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 fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
– Jean Genet
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
– Jean Genet
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.
– Jean Genet
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
– Jean Genet
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.
– Jean Genet
What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.
– Jean Genet
When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men.
– Jean Genet
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
– Jean Genet
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
– Jean Genet