Quote

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

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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
Grows
Banner
Nothing
Catastrophe
Asia
Prophet
East
Mustaches
Horror
Dusty
Green
Delirium
Except
Mustache

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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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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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I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
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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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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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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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I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
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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.
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The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.
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A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward whether he is an honest man or given to lies whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.
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For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
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