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 BERGERThe strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
More John Berger Quotes
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What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
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It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
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Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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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 BERGER -
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
JOHN BERGER -
For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
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Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
JOHN BERGER