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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

John Berger

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
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

Alive Cicadas Legend Poem Poet Quiet Soul
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.
JOHN BERGER

Anguish Childhood Grief Learn Loss Period Suffer Total
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGER

Artist Country Event Influence might Outgoing Political Themselves Time Tragedies
The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
JOHN BERGER

Century Close Disappear Helpless Horizon Other People See
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

Achieve Country Deprivation Desirable Develop False Impose Intensive Standard Today
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

Autobiographical Discovery Drawing Event Imagine Record Remembered Seen
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
JOHN BERGER

Character Death Modern Notion Spectular Time Transferred
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
JOHN BERGER

Establish Explain Fact Facts Place Seeing Surround Undo Word World
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
JOHN BERGER

More Mystery Pain Philosophical Presecute Space Speculation
Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.
JOHN BERGER

Alone Carry Century Chair Clothes Heart Later Learn Like Live Poem Poet Read Want
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
JOHN BERGER

Death Flirting Flow Life Photography
Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
JOHN BERGER

Continual Define Poetry Reassembking Repair Scattered Separate Space
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
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
JOHN BERGER

Invisible Photograph Play Time True
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

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

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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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Popular Authors

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