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The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Joseph Brodsky
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It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours.
Joseph Brodsky
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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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On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.
Joseph Brodsky
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Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment.
Joseph Brodsky
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The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.
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.
Joseph Brodsky
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Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Joseph Brodsky
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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?... Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
Joseph Brodsky
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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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We all knew the name Eliot. For any Eastern European, Eliot is a kind of Anglo-Saxon brand name.
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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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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In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
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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Weaknesses have a certain function in a poem . . . some strategy in order to pave the reader's way to the impact of this or that line.
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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There is no other antidote to the vulgarity of the human heart than doubt and good taste, which one finds fused in works of great literature.
Joseph Brodsky
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As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.
Joseph Brodsky
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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.
Joseph Brodsky
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For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson of your life - the lesson of your utter insignificance.
Joseph Brodsky
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The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches.
Joseph Brodsky
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For darkness restores what light cannot repair. There we are married, blest, we make once more the two-backed beast and children are the fair excuse of what we're naked for.
Joseph Brodsky
Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Joseph Brodsky
Creative Commons
Born:
May 24, 1940
Died:
January 28, 1996
(aged 55)
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