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.
JOHN BERGEREvery authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
More John Berger Quotes
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Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
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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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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
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A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
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A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.
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My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
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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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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
JOHN BERGER