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In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

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
Faster
Surface
Rule
Bottom
General
Things
Unpleasant
Sooner

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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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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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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The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
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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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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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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.
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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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If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
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I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.
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There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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Every life has a file, if you will.
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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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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
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Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
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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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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.
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