American - Poet | May 24, 1940 - January 28, 1996
Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.
Joseph Brodsky
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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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By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.
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I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
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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.
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Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.
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Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
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What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react.
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It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.
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Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.
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If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.
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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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