To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
JOHN BERGERIn the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
More John Berger Quotes
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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All creation is in the art of seeing.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
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To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
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Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
JOHN BERGER






