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10 John Berger Quotes To Ponder

By January 4, 2017November 5th, 2019Authors, Quotations

Booker Prize (1972) winner John Berger, born 5th November 1926 in Stoke Newington, UK, was a writer, poet, art critic and painter. His works ranged from art critique to screenplays, poetry to fiction, and he gained awards over the decades for his accomplishments. Berger died at the age of 90 on January 2017 in Paris, France, survived by his three children: film director Jacob Berger, writer and critic Katya Berger, and artist Yves Berger.

We celebrate his life and work with ten of our favourite Berger quotes, selecting some of his most thought provoking and intriguing musings.




“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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”



“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.”

“The promise is that again and again from the garbage the scattered feathers the ashes and broken bodies something new and beautiful may be born”

“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)”

“Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart… Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.”

“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.”



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