Jean Genet Quotes

“My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.”

Source: The Balcony

Jean Genet book Our Lady of the Flowers

Source: Our Lady of the Flowers

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”

“Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.”

Source: The Thief's Journal

“Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!”

The Thief's Journal (1949)

Jean Genet book Querelle of Brest

Source: Querelle of Brest

“I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.”

“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.”

Jean Genet Quotes about the world

“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.”

Source: The Thief's Journal

“But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.”

Source: The Thief's Journal

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

The Thief's Journal (1949)

Jean Genet Quotes

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

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

“Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.”

The Thief's Journal (1949)

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

Source: Prisoner of Love

Jean Genet book Our Lady of the Flowers

Source: Our Lady of the Flowers

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

Jean Genet book Our Lady of the Flowers

Source: Our Lady of the Flowers

“Betrayal is beautiful.”

“When I got to the street, I walked boldly. But I was always accompanied by an agonizing thought: the fear that honest people may be thieves who have chosen a cleverer and safer way of stealing.”

Source: The Thief's Journal

“Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.”

Source: Miracle of the Rose

Jean Genet book Querelle of Brest

Source: Querelle of Brest

“The pimp has a grin, never a smile.”

“… beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.”

Source: The Balcony

“It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.”

Source: Miracle of the Rose

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

Source: The Balcony

“The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side.”

Source: The Balcony

“I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.”

Edmund White's preface to Prisoner of Love

“If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!”

The Thief's Journal (1949)

“This violence is a calm that disturbs you.”

The Thief's Journal (1949)

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.”

The Thief's Journal (1949)

“By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.”

The Thief's Journal (1949)

“With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.”

The Thief's Journal (1949)

“So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.”

In reference to the French Gestapo
The Thief's Journal (1949)

“But I would adore that thief who is my mother.”

The Balcony (1956)

“Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?”

The Thief's Journal (1949)