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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.

John Berger

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
JOHN BERGER

Animal Look Offer Opportunity Public Purpose Visitor Zoos
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGER

Inspirational Light Material Photography Primary
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.
JOHN BERGER

Envy Herself Imagine Justify Loving Menat Object Other Product Transform
A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
JOHN BERGER

Allow Boycott Consider Craven Distinct Elected Government People Pressure Tactic
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
JOHN BERGER

Event Given Name Need Occurred Story
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
JOHN BERGER

Associate Hair Need Passion Sexual
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 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.
JOHN BERGER

Art Bourgeoisie Cinema Discover Learn People Popular Princes Single Sky Vagrant
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
JOHN BERGER

Burden Camera Forget God Like Memories Photography Relieve Survey Us Yet
Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
JOHN BERGER

Achievement Behind Deceptive Landscape Life Seem Setting Sometimes Struggle Success
For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
JOHN BERGER

Lot Me Out Paper Returning Take White
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
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.
JOHN BERGER

Bases Extreme Finishing Giacometti History Impossible Incomplete Portrayed Proposition Reality Share Staring
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
What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
JOHN BERGER

Connect Difficult Significant Statement Strange Understand
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
JOHN BERGER

Back Herself Love Offer Price Product Publicity Stealing

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.

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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.

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Popular Authors

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