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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
Things
Unpleasant
Sooner
Faster
Surface
Rule
Bottom
General

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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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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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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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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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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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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If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.
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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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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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Man is what he reads.
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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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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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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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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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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.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.
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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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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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