Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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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To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
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Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
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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.
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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.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
JOHN BERGER -
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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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
JOHN BERGER -
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
JOHN BERGER -
It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
JOHN BERGER -
Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGER -
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 -
You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGER