Time & Perspective Quote by Jean Genet

Grandeur, for Genet, is never the clean shine of public virtue; it is something smuggled out of the night. The line insists on a counterintuitive apprenticeship: before the grand gesture comes the long, private apprenticeship of desire. "Dream a long time" isn’t self-help patience, it’s incubation. Genet gives dreaming the slow time of fermentation, the kind that changes a person’s appetites and makes action feel inevitable rather than performative.

The second clause sharpens the blade: "dreaming is nursed in darkness". Darkness here is doing double duty. Psychologically, it’s the protected interior where fantasies can grow without being corrected into respectability. Socially, it evokes the spaces Genet knew intimately: marginality, secrecy, criminality, queer life under surveillance, the backstage of polite society. Dreams need darkness because daylight brings policing: family, law, religion, taste. The subtext is that "grandeur" doesn’t come from approval; it comes from the parts of the self that learned to live without it.

As a dramatist, Genet is also talking craft. Theatre is literally nursed in darkness: the auditorium, the wings, the rehearsal room where identities are tried on. His grandeur is theatrical in the best sense - stylized, transgressive, made. You don’t arrive at it by being good; you arrive by sustaining an inner vision long enough to risk looking monstrous or ridiculous when you finally act.

Intent-wise, it’s a manifesto for the outsider’s imagination: treat your hidden life not as shame, but as the engine room of transformation.