It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
JOHN BERGER
To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….
More John Berger Quotes
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Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
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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.
JOHN BERGER