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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
Proletariat
Describes
Marx
Caught
Way

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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
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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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Man is what he reads.
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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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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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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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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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If I can get somewhere, I'm all right. If not, I'm miserable.
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Poetry is what is gained in translation.
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I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.
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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.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
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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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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.
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
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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.
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
Joseph Brodsky