Quote

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.

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
Body
Fails
Find
Perceive
Command
Alias
Failing
Aliases
Virtue
Adjusts
Create
Commands
Beauty
Solace
Eye
Ugliness

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If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
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Man is what he reads.
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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 always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
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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 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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After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.
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Every life has a file, if you will.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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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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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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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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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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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.
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Poetry is what is gained in translation.
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For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
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