John Berger Quote

When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitent, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counterattacks, made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a malestrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no such occasion did an angel come.

John Berger

When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitent, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counterattacks, made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a malestrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no such occasion did an angel come.

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About John Berger

John Peter Berger ( BUR-jər; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) 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 the BBC series of the same name, was influential. He lived in France for over fifty years.