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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

Joseph Brodsky

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Joseph Brodsky
Age: 55 †
Born: 1940
Born: May 24
Died: 1996
Died: January 25
Author
Dramaturge
Essayist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
St. Petersburg
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky
Snobbery
Despair
Form

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
Joseph Brodsky
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For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Joseph Brodsky
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Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.
Joseph Brodsky
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My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.
Joseph Brodsky
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In Russia, the moment a person opens his mouth you know where he's from. There's the uniformity of experience of an individual in Russia. When you're about 7 years old you get into school and you get put in this factory or this bureaucracy or whatever. The options are computable. Here it's tremendously diverse.
Joseph Brodsky
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As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
Joseph Brodsky
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When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
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Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
Joseph Brodsky
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Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
Joseph Brodsky
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I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.
Joseph Brodsky
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The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.
Joseph Brodsky
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Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
Joseph Brodsky
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
Joseph Brodsky
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The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.
Joseph Brodsky
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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
Joseph Brodsky
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Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.
Joseph Brodsky
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
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Every life has a file, if you will.
Joseph Brodsky
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Joseph Brodsky
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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph Brodsky