Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
JOHN BERGERThose who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
More John Berger Quotes
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
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Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
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A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
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There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
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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 publicity works upon anxiety.
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
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Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGER






