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All Quotes by author - Joseph Brodsky
" After the last line of a poem, nothing follows except literary criticism. "
Nothing
Line
Poem
" An ethical man doesn't need a consensus of his allies in order to act against something he finds reprehensible. "
Ethical
Need
Against
" A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth. "
Mind
Heart
Win
" Bad politics make for bad morals. "
Bad
Politics
Morals
" 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. "
Nature
Time
Work
" Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them there comes a moment when the center ceases to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but language. "
Because
Hold
Language
" Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. "
Family
Friends And Family
Friends
" Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. "
Purity
Always
Confident
" 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. "
Boredom
Language
Life
" I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination. "
Literature
Think
American
" I like the idea of isolation. I like the reality of it. You realize what you are... not that the knowledge is inevitably rewarding. "
You
Reality
Like
" 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. "
Myself
Day
Road
" It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything. "
Something
Well
Education
" I was fortunate enough to write about things I really love, and love can be very analytic. "
Enough
Fortunate
Things
" Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse. "
Way
Bad
Life
" No man-made system is perfect, and the system of oppression is no exception. It is subject to fatigue, to cracks, which you are the likelier to discover the longer your term. "
Oppression
Your
You
" Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair. "
Form
Despair
Only
" 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. "
Good
Thought
Nature
" 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. "
Criticism
Own
Past
" The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings, but also in our separations. "
Sometimes
Only
Love
" The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed. "
Infinity
Any
Far
" The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie. "
First
Consciousness
Real
" Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable. "
Remember
Inevitable
Loss
" Venice is eternity itself. "
Eternity
Itself
Venice
" What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness. "
Everything
Beauty
King
" Who included me among the ranks of the human race? "
Who
Human
Race
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