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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.

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
Cannot
Poems
Soul
Poets
Wanted
Souls
Never
Wrote
Poet
Quiet
Cicadas
Alive
Legend
Keep
Legends

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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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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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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.
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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. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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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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