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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.

John Berger

What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
JOHN BERGER

Absorb Activity Draw Else Everything Forget Happen Mean Think Thinking
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.
JOHN BERGER

Earth Field Gesture Imagination Paint Ploughed Reality Road Roadmaker Turn Warth
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
JOHN BERGER

Death Flirting Flow Life Photography
Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
JOHN BERGER

Animal Born Distinguish Men Relationship Symbol Yet
We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
JOHN BERGER

Earth Explanation Knowledge Quite Sight Yet
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
The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
JOHN BERGER

Female Herself Object Sight Surveyed Turn Vision Woman
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
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
JOHN BERGER

Anywhere Consequences Every Hour Modern People Political Politics Thousand Writing
You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
JOHN BERGER

According Event Events Plan Plans
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.
JOHN BERGER

Naked Oneness Oneself Order Other Recognize Sight
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER

Between Know Relation Settle
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
JOHN BERGER

Forget Opposite Other Pain Painting Photography Remind Way
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

Life Loss More Period Rest Suffer Together
Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
JOHN BERGER

Neither Product Truth Utopian Writer
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.
JOHN BERGER

Connect Difficult Significant Statement Strange Understand

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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