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…the prisoner’s dreams is the guard’s spirituality
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Ah! Do not judge the gods, young man, they have painful secrets.
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The past is the luxury of proprietors.
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In any case, if you ever leave me with a handsome man, do not tell me that you trust me because, let me warn you: that is not what will prevent me from deceiving you, if I want to. On the contrary.
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A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
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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.
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Jupiter: I gave you the liberty to serve me.Orestes: That is possible, but it has turned against you and there is nothing either one of us can do about it.
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Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
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esse est percipi, and he recognizes himself as being only insofar as he is perceived.
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Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.
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You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.
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Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.
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If only you knew how little I care. Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser.
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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.
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You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.
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In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.
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They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: 'Give me bread'.
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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.
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Suppose that I wish to deserve the title of 'robber of remorse' and that I place in myself all the townspeople’s repentence?
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On est ce qu'on veut.
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The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.
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I know only one Church: it is the society of men.
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…inversion…is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.
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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.