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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.

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
Sound
Good
Think
Thinking
Protestant
Protestants
Sounds
Catholic
Neither

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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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.
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.
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Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
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The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
Joseph Brodsky
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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Joseph Brodsky
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In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.
Joseph Brodsky
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Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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I don't have principles. I have nerves.
Joseph Brodsky
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In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.
Joseph Brodsky
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I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky
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A poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former gradually taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre the realization of it, for destiny.
Joseph Brodsky
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky
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I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.
Joseph Brodsky