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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
efc5f46	When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. 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.		story reading stories	John Berger
a1456ea	You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity," thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure."		projection misogyny sexism	John Berger
4761a7a	A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet ..		seeing identity	John Berger
795feab	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.		seeing explanations knowledge	John Berger
a3e1bb6	My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. 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.		poetry	John Berger
9e6964b	A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her.			John Berger
4dd07d1	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
20d3512	The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which as beggar is a reminder of nothing.			John Berger
bad9069	To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.			John Berger
6dc6394	If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.		storytelling stories	John Berger
45ad6da	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
127d62e	When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate		love-quotes making-love sight	John Berger
6e2e82d	History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past		present history future past mystification	John Berger
617eadc	All publicity works upon anxiety.			John Berger
f0daef3	I was scared of one thing after another. I still am. Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless or you can be free, you can't be both.			John Berger
d7e5fca	The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power o..		women publicity envy fashion glamour	John Berger
9a3206c	To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. ( The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguise. To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a..			John Berger
46f5198	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.			John Berger
7eaed1c	The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. 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.		love envy	John Berger
7518e2e	The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.			John Berger
877ced0	If you have to cry, he said, and sometimes you can't help it, if you have to cry, cry afterwards, never during! Remember this. Unless you're with those who love you, only those who love you, and in that case you're already lucky, for there are never many who love you -- if you're with them, you can cry during. Otherwise you cry afterwards			John Berger
9df8d60	Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.			John Berger
92e34c6	Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and t..		prose stories	John Berger
bbe9d35	A photograph is not necessarily a lie, but it isn't the truth either. It's more like a fleeting, subjective impression.			John Berger
fef5bbf	Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.			John Berger
04fcf14	Hold Everything Dear			John Berger
1aece47	Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.			John Berger
dbad46e	So time doesn't count, and place does?' I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed.			John Berger
721d87f	At some point when tending someone you love who is in pain, you reach the edge of a lake, and you look at each other with such joy at the stillness. [Letter unsent]			John Berger
94cb975	I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars.		individuality hierarchies subversion institution orphan solidarity	John Berger
55e06f8	Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the..			John Berger
dc728cc	All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisible dream.			John Berger
e47b48c	We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.		visible invisible	John Berger
aa94888	A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. ... ... Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. Ev..			John Berger
a25d2e4	It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes,will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufactur..			John Berger
bc8b1a0	I've learnt something more. The expectation of a body can last as long as any hope. Like mine expecting yours. As soon as they gave you two life sentences, I stopped believing in their time.			John Berger
2544c6c	Publicity images often use sculptures or paintings to lend allure or authority to their own message. Framed oil paintings often hang in shop windows as part of their display. Any work of art 'quoted' by publicity serves two purposes. Art is a sign of affluence; it belongs to the good life; it is part of the furnishing which the world gives to the rich and the beautiful. But a work of art also suggests a cultural authority, a form of dignity..			John Berger
dca650d	The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.			John Berger
a301c56	aml 'lW njb 'bd. nh lqsw@ b`ynh 'n n'ty brwH 'khr~ l~ hdh l`lm.			John Berger
e934860	When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitent, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in f..			John Berger
3ac14a4	Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.			John Berger
c5d5bca	No place for illusions here. The beat doesn't stop solitude, it doesn't cure pain, you can't telephone it - it's simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story.			John Berger
d7beeac	But for the overcrowded, for those who have little or nothing except, sometimes, courage and love, hope works differently. Hope is then something to bite on, to put between the teeth. Don't forget this. Be a realist. With hope between the teeth comes the strength to carry on even when fatigue never lets up, comes strength, when necessary, to choose not to shout at the wrong moment, comes the strength above all not to howl. A person, with ho..		survival	John Berger
e9a830c	hnk frq shs` byn l'ml w ltwq` . fy lbd `tqdtu 'n lfrq ykmn fy lmd@ lzmny@ , w 'n l'ml yntZr 'mran mzl b`yd lmnl knt mkhTy'@ . ltwq` yntmy l~ ljsd w l'ml yntmy l~ lrwH hdh hw lfrq . ytHwr lthnn w ythyr 'Hdhm lakhr 'w yTmy'nh w lkn lkl mnhm Hlm ykhtlf `n lakhr . t`lmt shyy'an Dfyan hw 'nh yumkn 'n tdwm twq`t ljsd Twylan mthl 'y 'ml mthl ntZr jsdy jsdk .. .			John Berger

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