John Berger

“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.”

“english autumn mornings are often like mornings nowhere else in the world.The air is cold.The floorboards are cold.It is perhaps this coldness which sharpens the tang of the hot cup of tea. Outside, steps on the gravel crunch a little more loudly than a month ago because of the very slight frost”

“The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death. The same sense of culmination.”

“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.”

“Gerçekte hep iki zaman arasındayızdır: Gövdenin ve bilincin zamanı arasında. Bütün öbür kültürlerdeki ruh ve gözde arasındaki ayrım işte buradan kaynaklanır. Öncelik her zaman ruhundur ve yeri bir başka zamanın aktığı çizgidedir.”

“Yıldız kümelerni ilk keşfedip onlara ad veren öykücülerdi. Bir avuç yıldız arasına düşsel bir çizgi çekince kimlik ve birer imge kazanıyordu yıldızlar. Çizgiye işlenmiş yıldızlar bir anlatıya işlenmiş olaylar gibiydi. Yıldızların küme oluşturduğunu düşlemek kuşkusuz ne yıldızları ne de onları çeviren kara boşluğu değiştirdi. Değiştirdiği şey insanların geceleyin göğü okuma biçimiydi.”

“uygarlığın olmadığı yerlerde ev bir evle değil, bir eylem ya da eylemler kümesiyle temsil edilir. herkesinki kendine özgüdür. bir zorunluluk duyulmadan seçilmiş eylemler kendi içlerinde geçici olabilirlr belki, ama herhangi bir binadan daha kalıcı ve sağlam sığınaklar sunarlar. Ev o zaman bir mekan olmaktan çıkar, yaşanan bir hayatın anlatılmamış öyküsü olur. En can alıcı noktaysa, evin aslında insanın adından başka bir şey olmadığıdır - birçok kişiye göre de insan adsızdır.”

“Thus painting itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability of what money could buy. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.”

“All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves toward 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 the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out”

“To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.”

“Publicity is in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future... According to publicity, to be sophisticated is to live beyond conflict.”

“Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.”

“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.”

“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]”

“They can't foresee what we intend to do next. This is why they lose their nerve. They can't cross the zone of silence they herd us into. A zone bordered on their side by the distant din of their false accusations, and on our side by our silent final intentions.”

“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.”

“The single word that counted on Wednesday was the one that came from the muzzle of a gun, addressed to somebody on their knees. Better to choose our hour than to accept this. We know each other. We've known each other from the time of Crocodilopolis. [Letter unsent]”

“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.”

“Hold Everything Dear”

“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”

“History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past”

“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.”

“آمل ألاّ انجب أبدا. إنها القسوة بعينها أن نأتي بروح أخرى إلى هذا العالم.”

“To be naked is to be oneself.To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.”

“To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.”

“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 always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....One might simplify this by saying: 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 female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

“The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.”

“A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.”

“Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.”

“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.”

“Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.”

“The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.”

“Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why /but the editorialists forget it /terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.”

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”

“We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is. The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture, and consequently if somebody demonstrates the extent of the property interest in a given cultural field, it is said to be a demonstration of his obsession. And this allows the Cultural Establishment to project for a little longer its false rationalized image of itself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

“I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.”

“Sorrel soup:"You cut the egg into slices, and you eat it with the green soup. And the mixture of the sharp green acidity and the round comfort of the egg reminds you of something extraordinary and far away.Of home?Certainly not, not even for Poles.Of what then?...Of survival, perhaps.”

“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.”

“If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.”

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

“The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.”

“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.”

“Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.”

“All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisible dream.”

“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.”

“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 fact, was that my counterattacks, made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a malestrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no such occasion did an angel come.”