Quote

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

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
Make
Fashion
Getting
Tell
Doesn
Tickle
Truth
Published
Feel
Poems
Feels
Ego
Trying
Russia

More quotes by 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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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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Poetry is what is gained in translation.
Joseph Brodsky
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If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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.
Joseph Brodsky
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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
Joseph Brodsky
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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
Joseph Brodsky
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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
Joseph Brodsky
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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