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'fahrenheit 9/11' Is Astounding. Not So Much As A Film - Although It Is Cunning And Moving - But As An Event.
-John Berger
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'fahrenheit 9/11' Is Astounding.

John Berger
...
'fahrenheit 9/11' Is Astounding. Not So Much As A Film - Although It Is Cunning And Moving - But As An Event.

Understanding the Quote: "'fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. not so much as a film - although..."

This quote by John Berger reflects deeply on the theme of moving. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Moving, Events, Film, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how John Berger interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About John Berger

John Berger is celebrated for insightful thoughts on moving and events. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Moving
Events
Film
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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)
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For The Artist, Drawing Is Discovery. And That Is Not Just A Slick Phrase; It Is Quite Literally True.
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The Existence Of Pleasure Is The First Mystery. The Existence Of Pain Has Prompted Far More Philosophical Speculation. Pleasure And Pain Need To Be Considered Together; They Are Inseparable. Yet The Space Filled By Each Is Perhaps Different. Pleasure, Defined As A Sense Of Gratification, Is Essential For Nature
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Without Ethics Man Has No Future. This Is To Say Mankind Without Them Cannot Be Itself. Ethics Determine Choices And Actions And Suggest Difficult Priorities.
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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.
Grief
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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.
Drawing
People
Trying
Hope Is A Contraband Passed From Hand To Hand And Story To Story.
Hands
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In The Average European Oil Painting Of The Nude The Principal Protagonist Is Never Painted. He Is The Spectator In Front Of The Picture And He Is Presumed To Be A Man.
Men
Average
Oil
It Can Happen That A Book, Unlike Its Authors, Grows Younger As The Years Pass.
Book
Years
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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.
Vanity
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If The Public Photograph Contributes To A Memory, It Is To The Memory Of An Unknowable And Total Stranger.
Memories
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The Human Imagination... Has Great Difficulty In Living Strictly Within The Confines Of A Materialist Practice Or Philosophy. It Dreams, Like A Dog In Its Basket, Of Hares In The Open.
Dream
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The Zoo Cannot But Disappoint.
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What Makes Photography A Strange Invention Is That Its Primary Raw Materials Are Light And Time.
Inspirational
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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.
Compassion
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Traditional Chinese Art Looked At The Earth From A Confucian Mountain Top; Japanese Art Looked Closely Around Screens; Italian Renaissance Art Surveyed Conquered Nature Through The Window Or Door-frame Of A Palace. For The Cro-magnons, Space Is A Metaphysical Arena Of Continually Intermittent Appearances And Disappearances.
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There's The Artist's Intimacy And Truthfulness To Himself, But An Equal Intimacy To The Other [the One Drawn]. Picasso Drawings Are Like That... The Rembrandts Are Like That. The Artist Who Most Often Did That Was Van Gogh.
Artist
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So Time Doesn't Count, And Place Does?' I Said This To Tease Her. When I Was A Man, I Liked Teasing Her And She Went Along With It, Consenting, For It Reminded Us Both Of A Sadness That Had Passed.
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All Photographs Are There To Remind Us Of What We Forget. In This - As In Other Ways - They Are The Opposite Of Paintings. Paintings Record What The Painter Remembers. Because Each One Of Us Forgets Different Things, A Photo More Than A Painting May Change Its Meaning According To Who Is Looking At It.
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You Can Plan Events, But If They Go According To Your Plan They Are Not Events.
Events
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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.
Oil
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[o]ften Art Has Judged The Judges, Pleaded Revenge To The Innocent And Shown To The Future What The Past Suffered, So That It Has Never Been Forgotten. . . .
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We Only See What We Look At. To Look Is An Act Of Choice.
Choices
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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.
Priorities
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The True Content Of A Photograph Is Invisible, For It Derives From A Play, Not With Form, But With Time.
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Speak
If Every Event Which Occurred Could Be Given A Name, There Would Be No Need For Stories.
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Ever Since The Greek Tragedies, Artists Have, From Time To Time, Asked Themselves How They Might Influence Ongoing Political Events.
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I Wanted To Write About Looking At The World, So It's More About Helping People, Or Persuading People, To See What Is Around Us; Both The Marvellous And The Terrible.
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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.
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Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... All Believed In The Social Role Of Art... Their Works Were Like Hinged Doors, Connecting Activity With Activity. Art With Engineering; Music With Painting; Poetry With Design; Fine Art With Propaganda; Photographs With Typography; Diagrams With Action; The Studio With The Street.
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What Is Saved In The Cinema When It Achieves Art Is A Spontaneous Continuity With All Mankind. It Is Not An Art Of The Princes Or The Bourgeoisie. It Is Popular And Vagrant. In The Sky Of The Cinema People Learn What They Might Have Been And Discover What Belongs To Them Apart From Their Single Lives.
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To Be Desired Is Perhaps The Closest Anybody In This Life Can Reach To Feeling Immortal.
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What Distinguished Man From Animals Was The Human Capacity For Symbolic Thought, The Capacity Which Was Inseparable From The Development Of Language In Which Words Were Not Mere Signals, But Signifiers Of Something Other Than Themselves. Yet The First Symbols Were Animals. What Distinguished Men From Animals Was Born Of Their Relationship With Them.
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The Camera Relieves Us Of The Burden Of Memory.
Photography
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A Drawing Is Essentially A Private Work, Related Only To The Artist's Own Needs; A 'finished' Statue Or Canvas Is Essentially A Public, Presented Work - Related Far More Directly To The Demands Of Communication.
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A Drawing Is An Autobiographical Record Of One's Discovery Of An Event - Either Seen, Remembered Or Imagined. A 'finished' Work Is An Attempt To Construct An Event In Itself.
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The Contradiction In Perspective Was That It Structured All Images Of Reality To Address A Single Spectator Who, Unlike God, Could Only Be In One Place At A Time.
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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.
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The Heart Of Paris Is Like Nothing So Much As The Unending Interior Of A House. Buildings Become Furniture, Courtyards Become Carpets And Arrases, The Streets Are Like Galleries, The Boulevards Conservatories. It Is A House, One Or Two Centuries Old, Rich, Bourgeois, Distinguished. The Only Way Of Going Out, Or Shutting The Door Behind You, Is To Leave The Centre.
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Compare The Cinema With Theatre. Both Are Dramatic Arts. Theatre Brings Actors Before A Public And Every Night During The Season They Re-enact The Same Drama. Deep In The Nature Of Theatre Is A Sense Of Ritual. The Cinema, By Contrast, Transports Its Audience Individually, Singly, Out Of The Theatre Towards The Unknown.
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Form
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Shopping
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All Creation Is In The Art Of Seeing.
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Hate
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We Who Draw Do So Not Only To Make Something Observed Visible To Others, But Also To Accompany Something Invisible To Its Incalculable Destination
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I Can't Tell You What Art Does And How It Does It, But I Know That Often Art Has Judged The Judges, Pleaded Revenge To The Innocent And Shown To The Future What The Past Suffered, So That It Has Never Been Forgotten. Art, When It Functions Like This, Becomes A Meeting-place Of The Invisible, The Irreducible, The Enduring, Guts, And Honor.
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Flirting
Flow
If Everything That Existed Were Continually Being Photographed, Every Photograph Would Become Meaningless.
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Order
Naked
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Men
Done
Contrast
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Thinking
Forget Everything
Men Look At Women. Women Watch Themselves Being Looked At.
Love
Men
Watches
To Be Naked Is To Be Oneself.
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Oneself
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Envy
Culture
Satisfaction
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Opportunity
Challenges
Unlike Any Other Visual Image, A Photograph Is Not A Rendering, An Imitation Or An Interpretation Of Its Subject, But Actually A Trace Of It. No Painting Or Drawing, However Naturalist, Belongs To Its Subject In The Way That A Photograph Does.
Photography
Drawing
Doe
At Times Failure Is Very Necessary For The Artist. It Reminds Him That Failure Is Not The Ultimate Disaster. And This Reminder Liberates Him From The Mean Fussing Of Perfectionism.
Mean
Artist
Perfection
It Is Not Usually Possible In A Poem Or A Story To Make The Relationship Between Particular And Universal Fully Explicit. Those Who Try To Do So End Up Writing Parables.
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Trying
Stories
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.
Loss
Space
Together
The Extreme Proposition On Which Giacometti Based All His Mature Work Was That No Reality... Could Ever Be Shared. This Is Why He Believed It Impossible For A Work To Be Finished. This Is Why The Content Of Any Work Is Not The Nature Of The Figure Or Head Portrayed But The Incomplete History Of Him Staring At It.
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Finishing
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Photographs Bear Witness To A Human Choice Being Exercised In A Given Situation. A Photograph Is A Result Of The Photographer's Decision That It Is Worth Recording That This Particular Event Or This Particular Object Has Been Seen. If Everything That Existed Were Continually Being Photographed, Every Photograph Would Become Meaningless.
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Choices
Decision
The Envied Are Like Bureaucrats; The More Impersonal They Are, The Greater The Illusion (for Themselves And For Others) Of Their Power.
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Envy
Illusion
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Emigration
Metropolis
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Cutting
Past
Every City Has A Sex And Age Which Have Nothing To Do With Demography.
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Cities
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'fahrenheit 9/11' Is Astounding. Not So Much As A Film - Although It Is Cunning And Moving - But As An Event.
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Events
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Painting
Pianist
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Government
People
Way
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Reassurance
Illusion
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Nature
Believe
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Death
Time
Character
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Wish
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The Autobiographical Doesn't Interest Me. I Could Think Of Few Things Less Interesting Than Rooting About In My Life.
Thinking
Interesting
Interest
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Naked
Oneself
One Can Say Of Language That It Is Potentially The Only Human Home, The Only Dwelling Place That Cannot Be Hostile To Man.
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Men
Dwelling Place
What Is Saved In The Cinema When It Achieves Art Is A Spontaneous Continuity With All Mankind.
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Cinema
Vagrants
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Landscape
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Pursuit
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Giving
Normal
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Two
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Breathing Space
Arches
Cigarette
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Lying
Media
Political
Capitalism Survives By Forcing The Majority, Whom It Exploits, To Define Their Own Interests As Narrowly As Possible. This Was Once Achieved By Extensive Deprivation. Today In The Developed Countries It Is Being Achieved By Imposing A False Standard Of What Is And What Is Not Desirable.
Country
Majority
Today
We Never Look At Just One Thing; We Are Always Looking At The Relation Between Things And Ourselves.
Looks
Relation
Just One
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.
Heart
Years
Clothes
Every Authentic Poem Contributes To The Labour Of Poetry... To Bring Together What Life Has Separated Or Violence Has Torn Apart.
Poetry
Together
Torn Apart
All Publicity Works Upon Anxiety.
Anxiety
Publicity
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.
Loss
Might
Would Be
When We Read A Story, We Inhabit It. The Covers Of The Book Are Like A Roof And Four Walls.
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Book
Reading
Do 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.
Soul
Alive
Legends
Those Who First Invented And Then Named The Constellations Were Storytellers. Tracing An Imaginary Line Between A Cluster Of Stars Gave Them An Image And An Identity. The Stars Threaded On That Line Were Like Events Threaded On A Narrative. Imagining The Constellations Did Not Of Course Change The Stars, Nor Did It Change The Black Emptiness That Surrounds Them. What It Changed Was The Way People Read The Night Sky.
Stars
Night
Sky
Words Are So Often Used In The Opposite Sense, As A Screen Of Diversion. It's The Struggle Towards Truthfulness Which Is The Same Whether One Is Writing A Poem, A Novel Or An Argument.
Struggle
Writing
Opposites
The Publicity Image Steals Her Love Of Herself As She Is, And Offers It Back To Her For The Price Of The Product.
Publicity
Stealing
Offers
Glamour Cannot Exist Without Personal Social Envy Being A Common And Widespread Emotion.
Envy
Emotion
Common
All Nationalisms Are At Heart Deeply Concerned With Names: With The Most Immaterial And Original Human Invention. Those Who Dismiss Names As A Detail Have Never Been Displaced; But The Peoples On The Peripheries Are Always Being Displaced. That Is Why They Insist Upon Their Continuity - Their Links With Their Dead And The Unborn.
Heart
Names
Links
To Remain Innocent May Also Be. To Remain Ignorant.
Ignorant
May
Innocent
The Essence Of Songs Is Neither Vocal Nor Cerebral But Organic. We Follow Songs In Order To Be Enclosed. We Find Ourselves Inside A Message. The Unsung, Impersonal World Remains Outside, On The Other Surface Of A Placenta. All Songs, Even When Their Content Or Rendering Is Strongly Masculine, Operate Maternally.
Song
Order
Essence
Directors Like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, And Spike Lee Have Used Non-professional Actors Precisely In Order That The People We See On The Screen May Be Scarcely More Explained Than Reality Itself. Professionals, Except Fo The Greatest, Usually Play Not Just The Necessary Role, But An Explanation Of The Role.
Reality
Order
Play
Paris, I Believe, Is A Man In His Twenties In Love With An Older Woman.
Believe
Men
Cities
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.
Sex
Teenager
Believe
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.
Medicine
Soul
Mountain
Never Again Shall A Single Story Be Told As Though It Were The Only One.
Stories
Advertising Is Not Merely An Assembly Of Competing Messages; It Is A Language Itself Which Is Always Being Used To Make The Same General Proposal
Messages
Language
Advertising
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.
Energy
Degrees
Appearance
All Weddings Are Similar, But Every Marriage Is Different.
Marriage
Wedding
Different
The Camera Relieves Us Of The Burden Of Memory. It Surveys Us Like God, And It Surveys For Us. Yet No Other God Has Been So Cynical, For The Camera Records In Order To Forget.
God
Photography
Memories
The Strange Power Of Art Is Sometimes It Can Show That What People Have In Common Is More Urgent Than What Differentiates Them. It Seems To Me It's Something That Theatre Can Do, But It's Rare; It's Very Rare.
Art
People
Theatre
History Always Constitutes The Relation Between A Present And Its Past. Consequently Fear Of The Present Leads To Mystification Of The Past
Past
Relation
One Of The Fundamental Reasons Why So Many Doctors Become Cynical And Disillusioned Is Precisely Because, When The Abstract Idealism Has Worn Thin, They Are Uncertain About The Value Of The Actual Lives Of The Patients They Are Treating. This Is Not Because They Are Callous Or Personally Inhuman: It Is Because They Live In And Accept A Society Which Is Incapable Of Knowing What A Human Life Is Worth.
Life
Doctors
Knowing
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