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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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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
Couldn
Seasoned
Happiness
Eccentricity
Happy
Surest
Evil
Individualism
Even
Originality
Feigned
Something
Extreme
Faked
Thinking
Extremes
Imposter
Defense
Imitated

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
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Man is what he reads.
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I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.
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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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If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.
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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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I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.
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The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.
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Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on West-Running Brook.
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I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
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The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
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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.
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
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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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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
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