“This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed’s.”

Source: Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986), p. 14

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Joseph Brodsky 17
Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature la… 1940–1996

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