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I'm a bad Jew, a bad Russian, a bad everything.

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
Russian
Jew
Everything

More quotes by 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.
Joseph Brodsky
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The Constitution doesn't mention rain.
Joseph Brodsky
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I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.
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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I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse the dark inside, or the darkness out.
Joseph Brodsky
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I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.
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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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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Every life has a file, if you will.
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
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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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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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There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.
Joseph Brodsky
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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
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A language is a more ancient and inevitable thing than any state.
Joseph Brodsky
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Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky
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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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How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Joseph Brodsky