What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
JOHN BERGERWhen we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
More John Berger Quotes
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
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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.
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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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A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.
JOHN BERGER -
The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
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This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
JOHN BERGER -
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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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGER -
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER