Quotes
Listed here are favorite quotes, from G. Quotes that inspire, or give a strong visual image, or just admiration the author's use of words .... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ....
These notes were collected in celebration of John Berger's birthday: November 5, 1926 John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text. “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.” ~John Berger I listened to a number of lectures and conversations on YouTube featuring Jon Berger, but this is the one I enjoyed the most ... relating to G. and Jon's progress as a writer. John Berger on the Booker Prize (1972) John Berger talked about the Booker Prize in 1972 on BBC. When accepting the Booker Berger made a point of donating half ...
ReplyDeleteIt was like entering a tower that she could not leave until he departed. Inside the tower she was both mistress and child. She played there either gravely or frivolously, with whatever he gave her. She could look out from the tower but she could never see the tower from the outside. The tower was their love affair.
The sheets on the unmade bed, the carpets, the furniture, the wrought-iron balcony outside the window, the lake which is the colour of steel and lavender, the Alps - everything within their sight - is unaffected by the rapid beating of each heart.
ReplyDeleteHer feelings are distributed in his body like veins. When she touches him, she has the sensation of touching herself made innocent.
ReplyDeleteFalling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one's feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.
ReplyDeleteIn the face of dawn, even the supreme egotist is tempted to forget himself. Thus I assume that the experience of day breaking or night falling is somewhat less subject to historical change than the experience of days themselves.
ReplyDeleteThere is only one way of being rich, but there are a thousand ways of being poor.
ReplyDeleteHe has thought of softness as a quality belonging either to something small and concentrated (like a peach) or else to something extensive but thin (like milk).
ReplyDeleteFirst experience is protected by a sense of enormous power; it wields magic.
ReplyDeleteWithin us there is the keenness, the sharpness to perform surgery. Within, if we have the courage to wield it, is the cutting edge to sever the whole world to which by compromised and flabby usage we are said to belong.
ReplyDelete'The progress of today in every field is nothing else but the absurd of yesterday.' ~Lugi Barzini
ReplyDeleteA profound emotion nails us to the spot. We do not move. We are lifeless, our souls shining in our eyes, and out hearts beating fast. We are spellbound by the great beauty of what we are seeing. A thousand years of life cannot annul this memory.
ReplyDeleteHe has a habit of holding his listeners' attention by suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence to take in a mouthful of food. He gesticulates rigidly with his large hands, as if they were wooden doors opening and shutting to let his words out and to prevent anyone else's ever entering into the home of his argument.
ReplyDeleteThe unexpected is often indescribable.
ReplyDelete... I am prepared to risk all that is not her, for the sake of all that she is.
ReplyDeleteShe was like a tree, she considered, that grew in the soil of her husband's garden but the leaves of which moved independently in the wind.
ReplyDeleteA forest is incontrovertible like a mountain. It is tolerant, like the sea, of everything which occurs within it.
ReplyDeleteDo 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.
ReplyDeleteI despise the dust of which I am composed: anyone can pursue and put an end to dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me What I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of centuries.
ReplyDeleteWhen you hear an artillery barrage you think: it's enough to wake up the damned in hell. But you're wrong. The noise of the artillery is the noise of the nations snoring in their sleep. And a few poets and revolutionaries suffer from insomnia.
ReplyDeleteA waltz is a circle in which ribbons of sentiment rise and fall. The music unties the bows - and ties them again.
ReplyDeleteUninterruptedly receding towards the sun, the transmission of its reflections becoming ever faster, the sea neither requires or recognizes any limit. The horizon is the straight bottom edge of a curtain arbitrarily and suddenly lowered upon a performance.
ReplyDelete