Joseph Brodsky Quotes
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I had been imprisoned three times and had twice been incarcerated in a madhouse.
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No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.
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I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.
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I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.
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This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.
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Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
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I don't suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved.
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I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year's Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.
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It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
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To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
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It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
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Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors.
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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.
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Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it begins to unfurl.
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I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.
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Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.
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The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.
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Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.
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Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
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Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
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The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
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English is the only interesting thing that's left in my life.
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There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.
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Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.