Quotes from John Berger

Every tradition forbids the asking of certain questions about what has really happened to you.

You can put your principles into a match-box but what fills the whole room is your instinctive responses.

The tombstones are not very different from those in other European cemeteries. Many record the deaths of several generations: the name, the year of birth, the day of death and the place of death, if it was not on the island. A name and two dates, the last one precise to the very day. This is what is recorded. About what happened between, apart from the bare fact of survival, not a word is written.

The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death.

Remember the Medici tomb with the figures of Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn? Two reclining men and two reclining women. The women modestly fold their legs together. Both men part their legs and, pushing, lift their pelvises, as though waiting for a birth. Not a birth of flesh and blood and not – heaven forbid – of symbols either. The birth they await is of the indescribable and endless mystery which their bodies incarnate

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 disguises.

It may be, for example, that Sheila is one figure among twenty; but for our own reasons she is the only one we have eyes for.)

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

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.

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

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

To remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.

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.

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.

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.

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

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.