When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
JOHN BERGERThis determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
More John Berger Quotes
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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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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The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
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As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.
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Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
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One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.
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The 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.
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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.
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Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
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At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
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A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
JOHN BERGER