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

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.
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.
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On the whole, love comes with the speed of light separation, with that of sound.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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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 grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
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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.
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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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.
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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
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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Man is what he reads.
Joseph Brodsky
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Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture and the people. They've been stolen from the people and now the stolen things are being returned to their owners, but I don't think their owners should be grateful to receive them.
Joseph Brodsky
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Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it on the contrary, throw it wide open.
Joseph Brodsky
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If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.
Joseph Brodsky
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If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky