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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.
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
Poetry
Realization
Taking
Latter
Takeover
Persons
Combination
Takeovers
Person
Former
Timbre
Human
Instruments
Sensation
Humans
Responsible
Gradually
Destiny
Sensations
Poet
Instrument
More quotes by Joseph Brodsky
On the whole, love comes with the speed of light separation, with that of sound.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Joseph Brodsky
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
I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.
Joseph Brodsky
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
Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Joseph Brodsky
If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Joseph Brodsky
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky
When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
Joseph Brodsky
I don't have principles. I have nerves.
Joseph Brodsky
I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.
Joseph Brodsky
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
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
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph Brodsky
I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
Joseph Brodsky
Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.
Joseph Brodsky
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
Man is what he reads.
Joseph Brodsky
The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
Joseph Brodsky
