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For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

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
Restores
Repair
Darkness
Cannot
Light

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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
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On the whole, love comes with the speed of light separation, with that of sound.
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I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse the dark inside, or the darkness out.
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Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
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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.
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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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.
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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.
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When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.
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If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.
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Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite.
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In general, in America, every discourse in literature in 15 minutes degenerates into a conversation about ethics, morality and this and that. The Holocaust and the consequences of it. Well, I find it terribly boring, predictable and unimportant, because what matters about literature is esthetic achievement.
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A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward whether he is an honest man or given to lies whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.
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I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
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