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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
Rather
Funny
Find
Trying
Isolation
Solitary
Pleasant
Ridiculous

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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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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot.
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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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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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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.
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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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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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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Man is what he reads.
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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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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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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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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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The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
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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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I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.
Joseph Brodsky