Bento's Sketchbook Quotes

“We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“When I'm drawing - and here drawing is very different from writing or reasoning - I have the impression at certain moments of participating in something like a visceral function, such as digestion or sweating, a function that is independent of the conscious will. This impression is exaggerated, but the practice or pursuit of drawing touches, or is touched by, something prototypical and anterior to logical reasoning.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“There is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and an au revoir! Alternately and ad infinitum.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“Accept the unknown. There are no secondary characters. Each one is silhouetted against the sky. All have the same stature. Within a given story some simply occupy more space.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“In the imaginative movement which prompts the impulse to draw repeats implicitly the same pattern...there is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and a au-revoir! Alternately and at infinitum.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“Lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there's skin behind it.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“I knew all the answers then. Where there are no words, knowledge comes through physical acts and through the space through which those acts are made; by permitting each act the space conferred meaning upon it and no further meaning was necessary.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“Every profound political protest is an appeal to a justice that is absent, and is accompanied by a hope that in the future this justice will be established; this hope, however, is not the first reason for the protest being made. One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds.

To protest is to refuse being reduced to a zero and to an enforced silence. Therefore, at the very moment a protest is made, if it is made, there is a small victory.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“A protest is not principally a sacrifice made for some alternative, more just future; it is an inconsequential redemption of the present.

The problem is how to live time and again with the adjective inconsequential.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook