Joseph Brodsky Quotes
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
Quotes to Explore
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I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.
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Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
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For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
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I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
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There is no longer any anonymity on the Web - unless we mandate it. The most personal information about your online habits is collected, bought and sold, often instantaneously and invisibly. Data collection is a business driven by profits at consumers' expense.
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It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.
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Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
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A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
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My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
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Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
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Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
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Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
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It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
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Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.
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I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.
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The Scottish Highlands are incredible. There seems to be magic and poetry everywhere.
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Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
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I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
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The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
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I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!
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Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did.
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The soul is too great to know itself, yet each individual portion of the soul seeks this knowledge, and in the seeking creates new possibilities of development, new dimensions of actuality. The individual self at any given moment can connect with its soul.
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Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
