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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.

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
Appreciation
Connections
Weirdo
Relationships
Creep
Friends
Creeps
Family
Cousin
Human
Cherish
Humans
Even
Super

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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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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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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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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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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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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.
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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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In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
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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.
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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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In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
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I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.
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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.
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When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
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A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre the realization of it, for destiny.
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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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In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
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The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
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