All Quotes

"If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner."

"There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck."

"I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm."

"One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day."

"I have nothing but contempt for you idiotic chosen ones who have the heart to rejoice when there are the damned in Hell and the poor on earth; as for me, I am on the side of men and I will not leave it."

"We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God."

"À celui qui donne un baiser ou un coup Rendez un baiser ou un coup Mais à celui qui donne sans que vous puissiez rendre Offrez toute la haine de votre coeur Car vous étiez esclaves et il vous asservit"

"If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything."

"I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul."

"Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."

"God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man."

"Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away."

"I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good."

"The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it"

"The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates."

"I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating."

"esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived."

"L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous."

"such mad confidence within despair."

"But when they have realized that it [society] rejects them forever, they themselves assume the ostracism of which they are victims so as not to leave the initiative to their oppressors"

"This inner revolution is realistic because it maintains itself deliberately within the framework of existing institutions; the oppressed reckon with the real situation."

"His business is here, it is here that he is despised and vilified, it is here that he must carry out his undertaking"

"Since he is unable to be the beloved, he will become the lover."

"...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating."

"In doing Good, I lose myself in Being, I abandon my particularity, I become a universal subject."

"The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man's needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him."

"The live dead-man is dead as a producer and alive insofar as he consumes"

"Abjection is a methodological conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian epoche: it establishes the world as a closed system which consciousness regards from without, in the manner of divine understanding."

"But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die."

"His obedience is real since he really and truly fulfills his mission, since he runs real risks in order to carry out the beloved's orders. But, on the other hand, it is imaginary because he submits only to a creature of his mind."

"He chooses the most feared, most hated man in order to worship him as a god, feeling sure that he is alone in perceiving the god's secret virtues."

"It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake"

"Moral solipsism."

"The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness."

"Only a neutral, who is indifferent to the stake and perhaps to all stakes, can appreciate aesthetically the grandeur of a fine disaster"

"Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible."

"Similarly, individual acts of aristocratic generosity do not eliminate pauperism; they perpetuate it."

"For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday."

"The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/"

"For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him...reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling."

"The world is sacred because it gives an inkling of a meaning that escapes us"

"...for one cannot enter an image unless one makes oneself imaginary"

"...the impossible must be supposed in order to explain the superdetermination of the event"

"He wanted to assume his entire condition, to carry the world on his shoulders and to become, in defiance of all, what all have made of him."

"...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality"

"Virtue is the death of conscience because it is the habit of Good, and yet the ethic of the honest man infinitely prefers virtue to the noblest agonies of conscience. Thus, being poses nonbeing and eliminates it. There is only being"

"For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value."

"Thus, Beauty is neither an appearance nor a being, but a relationship: the transformation of being into appearance"

"...in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it."

"That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur."