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

— John Berger

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.

— John Berger

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

— John Berger

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt 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 learn tonight how many years of learning by heart waited for you.

— John Berger

Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsome indifferent.

— John Berger

Nothing in the surrounding nature is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

— John Berger

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.

— John Berger

Perspective is not a science but a hope.

— John Berger

Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.

— John Berger

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 anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and 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.

— John Berger