Index Cards

After years of wishing for sleep it is in fact frightening to sleep this much.

“I take H [hashish] in order to be free. But in order to take H I must already be free.”

Genet often claimed that the happiest years of his life were those spent in the reformatory and in prison: “Prison isn’t prison, it’s escape, it’s freedom. There you can escape the trivial and return to the essential.”

“We are all so overwhelmed by culture that it is a relief to see something which is done directly, without any intention of being good or bad, done only because one wants to do it.”

“visible wretchedness is counterbalanced by a hidden glory.”

Genet disdained bourgeois pretension, as did Walser, who lived an almost Gandhian simplicity.

she was a believer in wholesomeness and common sense in an age of superstition and quackery.

“The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings.”

I am willing to do this as best I can but I will take no responsibility about doing it wrong.”