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When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

John Berger

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
JOHN BERGER

Alone Beautiful Believe Crystal Deeply Existence Less More Nature Ours Poppy
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
JOHN BERGER

Add All Cutting Daily Future Mean Media Modernism Past Presently
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
JOHN BERGER

Character Death Modern Notion Spectular Time Transferred
The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
JOHN BERGER

Cigarette Dialogue Noth Parentless Proscenium Shar Time
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER

Event Given Name Need Occurred Story
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.
JOHN BERGER

Different Forget Look Meaning Pain Remember Thing
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.
JOHN BERGER

Adjustment Against Derive Hope Injustice Justice Little Protest Shouting
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGER

Achievement Behind Deceptive Landscape Life Seem Setting Sometimes Struggle Success
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGER

Age Believe City Every Nothing Sex Teenager
My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.
JOHN BERGER

Born Clothes Heart Lullabies Swaddled Year
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
JOHN BERGER

Contribute Memories Photograph Stranger Unknowable
The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
JOHN BERGER

Confine Difficulty Dog Dream Human Imagination Live Materialist Philosophy Practice Strict
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
JOHN BERGER

Associate Hair Need Passion Sexual
Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGER

Action Choice Determine Ethics Priorities Suggests
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.
JOHN BERGER

Bases Extreme Finishing Giacometti History Impossible Incomplete Portrayed Proposition Reality Share Staring
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
JOHN BERGER

Beauty Naked Oneself Recognise Seen

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

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When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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