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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.

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
Inevitable
Ancient
State
Language
States
Thing

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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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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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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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
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Man is what he reads.
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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.
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
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The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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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.
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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 don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.
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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
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I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.
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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