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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.

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
Marx
Caught
Way
Proletariat
Describes

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I do not believe in political movements. I believe in personal movement, that movement of the soul when a man who looks at himself is so ashamed that he tries to make some sort of change - within himself, not on the outside.
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In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
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When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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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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The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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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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I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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.
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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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Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.
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