Joseph Brodsky
Poet
1940-05-24
Books by Joseph Brodsky
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Quotes by Joseph Brodsky
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...
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...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
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For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
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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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Life— the way it really is— is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
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...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
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... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. ...
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For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
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There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
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Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.
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The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.
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The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
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The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
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Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
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Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
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When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian, you get almost a psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything. It can help you understand, and it can discourage you, because you see how little can be done.
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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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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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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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