Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
JOHN BERGERTraditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
More John Berger Quotes
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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.
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For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
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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.
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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.
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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
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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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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
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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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.
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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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Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
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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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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
JOHN BERGER