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

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
Joseph Brodsky
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
Joseph Brodsky
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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
Joseph Brodsky
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When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
Joseph Brodsky
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
Joseph Brodsky
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Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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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In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
Joseph Brodsky
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Every life has a file, if you will.
Joseph Brodsky