The Thief's Journal
The Jean Genet edition
“If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
― Jean Genet, The Balcony
“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”
― Jean Genet
“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
― Jean Genet
“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”
― Jean Genet
“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal
“Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
“I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty. ”
― Jean Genet
“Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.”
― Jean Genet, Querelle of Brest
“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.”
― Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose
“It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.”
― Jean Genet, The Balcony
“The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day…The hour in which…every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
“The door made the usual, terrifying sound of a door.”
― Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose
“Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity.”
― Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose
“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, The Balcony
“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....”
― Jean Genet, The Balcony
“Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal
“When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by experimenting, making mistakes, sketching out freaks and other non-viable monsters that he has to tear up unless they disintegrate of their own accord. But the operative image is the one that's left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future. It doesn't matter whether or not the image corresponds to what they were really like: they managed to wrest a powerful image from that reality.”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
“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, The Thief's Journal
“I had recourse to magic, that is, to a kind of deliberate predisposition, an intuitive complicity with nature.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal
“Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
“We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.”
― Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love