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“How delightful to find a friend in everyone.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Friendship #Friends
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“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Book #Reading #Burning
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“For darkness restores what light cannot repair.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Light #Darkness
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“By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Art #Animal #Goal
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“Man is what he reads.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Education #Book #Inspiration
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“For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Attitude #Patriotism #Language
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“Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Despair #Form
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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
#Fake People #Life Is Hard #Masters
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“Bad literature is a form of treason.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Literature #Form #Treason
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“When I'm not writing or reading, I'm thinking about both.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Reading #Writing #Thinking
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“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Battle #Way #Good And Bad
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“Geography blended with time equals destiny.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Destiny #Land #Geography
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“If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Writing #Hands #Choices
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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
#Mustache #East #Green
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“Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Men #Tragedy #Negative
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“The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Blame #Moments #Resolve
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“Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Art #Poetry #Way
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“In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Poetry #Roles #Literature
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“Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Bored #Trying #Infinity
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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.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Happiness #Thinking #Evil
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“What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Life #Long #Should
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“There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Sight #Ruins #Dear
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“In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Surface #Faster #Bottom
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“Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Cousin #Family And Friends #Connections
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“Poetry is what is gained in translation.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Poetry Is #Translations
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“On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Love #Light #Sound
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“This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Glowing #Uprising #Generations
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“I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#God #Ideas #Spirit
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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
#Death #Proof #Almighty
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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.”
-- Joseph Brodsky
#Love #Fall #Passion
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