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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.

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
Poetry
Coming
Upon
Reconnects
Become
Separated
Way
Metaphor
Things
Connection
Like
Drawing
Connections

More quotes by John Berger

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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
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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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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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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
John Berger
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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. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
John Berger
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The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
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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
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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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.
John Berger
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.
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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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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
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.
John Berger
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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.
John Berger
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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 envied are like bureaucrats the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger
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The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
John Berger
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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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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
John Berger