Quote

Robert Frost's triumph was not being at John Kennedy's inauguration ceremony, but the day when he put the last period on West-Running Brook.

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
Last
Robert
Running
Ceremony
Triumph
John
Brook
Period
Inauguration
Periods
Brooks
West
Frost
Lasts
Kennedy

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On the whole, love comes with the speed of light separation, with that of sound.
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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
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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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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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In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
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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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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
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Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
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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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Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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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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Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky
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Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
Joseph Brodsky
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
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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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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky