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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
Bottom
General
Things
Unpleasant
Sooner
Faster
Surface
Rule

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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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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.
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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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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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When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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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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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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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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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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The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
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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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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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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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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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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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Man is what he reads.
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