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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

John Berger

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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Orphan
Autobiography
Begins
Alone
Sense
Form

More quotes by John Berger

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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
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The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
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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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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.
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The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
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Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
John Berger
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The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
John Berger
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What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
John Berger
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[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .
John Berger
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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
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
John Berger
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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.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. 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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