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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.

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
Nostalgia
Arguments
Creeds
Behalf
Exhausted
Utters
Argument
Ennui
Rather
Fervor
Evil
Creed

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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
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Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.
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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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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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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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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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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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If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
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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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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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There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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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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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.
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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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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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