Jean Genet

“Violence is a calm that disturbs you.”

“Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.”

“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.”

“Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.”

“I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.”

“I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.”

“I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.”

“It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.”

“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.”

“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”

“The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.”

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”

“What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.”

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”

“You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley....”

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