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I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.

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
Language
Understand
Write
Martyr
Doesn
Novelty
Didn
Especially
Writing
Democracy
Either
Rather

More quotes by Joseph Brodsky

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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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The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.
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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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I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.
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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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The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
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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.
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Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
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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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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
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I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am.
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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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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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.
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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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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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Bad literature is a form of treason.
Joseph Brodsky
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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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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