The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
JOHN BERGERPoetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
More John Berger Quotes
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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
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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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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
JOHN BERGER -
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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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
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It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
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What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
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You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
JOHN BERGER






