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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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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
Trying
Isolation
Solitary
Pleasant
Ridiculous
Rather
Funny
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More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
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The government, the state, they're just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can't possibly take them seriously.
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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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For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
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On the whole, love comes with the speed of light separation, with that of sound.
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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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If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.
Joseph Brodsky
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In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
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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.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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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Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.
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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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I was quite happy in Arkhangelsk.Subsequently, I was sent to a village. I liked it in its own way because it sounded to me very much like the tradition of a hired man in any world-class poem. That's what I was, a hired man. I was working for a collective farm.
Joseph Brodsky
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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
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.
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When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
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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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.
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