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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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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
Would
Communal
Wreck
Wrecks
Punish
Apartment
Kept
Become
Wanted

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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
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Poetry is what is gained in translation.
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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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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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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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In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.
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For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
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For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
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Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
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As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.
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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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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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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
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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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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.
Joseph Brodsky