Top 80 Jean Genet Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.”

— Jean Genet

52. “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

53. “Humility can only be born out of humiliation.”

— Jean Genet

54. “Would it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?”

— Jean Genet

55. “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

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

— Jean Genet

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Hell has degrees, so does love.”

— Jean Genet

60. “Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.”

— Jean Genet

61. “In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky.”

— Jean Genet

62. “There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.”

— Jean Genet

63. “The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.”

— Jean Genet

64. “As for me, I have chosen: I will be on the side of crime. And I will help the children, not to win back access to your houses, your factories, your schools, your laws, and sacraments, but to destroy them.”

— Jean Genet

65. “Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.”

— Jean Genet

66. “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

67. “Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.”

— Jean Genet

68. “If I can not have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched, not for the purpose of a sterile solitude, but in order to achieve something new with such rare matter.”

— Jean Genet

69. “En prison on ferme plus de portes qu’on n’en ouvre.”

— Jean Genet

70. “They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.”

— Jean Genet

71. “Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.”

— Jean Genet

72. “It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

74. “The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.”

— Jean Genet

75. “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.”

— Jean Genet

76. “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

77. “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.”

— Jean Genet

78. “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

79. “Saintliness means turning pain to good account. It means forcing the devil to be God.”

— Jean Genet

80. “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.”

— Jean Genet

81. “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.”

— Jean Genet

82. “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.”

— Jean Genet

83. “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.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet