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Joseph Brodsky Quotes

American - Poet | May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

Family Friends And Family Connections

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the holy book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

Life Win Small Book Game Lose

I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.

Age Myself Day Yellow Green Road

Man is what he reads.

Education Man He Reads

Venice is eternity itself.

Venice Eternity Itself

It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.

Education Everything Something Well

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.

Work Nature Alone Time Myself Man

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.

Blue Poetry Farmer Dangerous Crowd

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

Life Art Laugh Literature You Party

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.

Past Voice Criticism Political Own

I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.

Think You Citizen Poet English

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.

Nature Good Justice Thought Bad

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