John Berger Quotes

In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

You know when you're young you think you will always be. As you become more fragile, you reflect and you realize how much comfort can come from the past. Hymns can carry you into the future.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

There's always a race against time. I don't think for one moment that life gets better. How can it? One's body starts to fall apart.

There's nothing glorious in dying. Anyone can do it.

Our past is who we are, and death is one of our experiences. I lost my husband a long time ago, but it's always yesterday.

Death is not something any one of us want to dwell on, but we must all confront it at some point.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

I'm just fascinated by the past. You know, both by the possibilities it holds and by the complete tyranny of it, the way it sort of keeps you in this stranglehold and makes you want things that you no longer have and you can never get back.

By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

The minute you're born, you're getting older.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

We are tomorrow's past.

The past is over.